SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Are you feeling stressed? If the answer is, yes, you are not alone. In fact, we all experience stress at some point in our life. It is a hard truth that science educator Kate Biberdorf, also known as Kate the Chemist, has been facing a lot recently. In this episode of her podcast with KCUR, Seeking A Scientist, she set out to understand the science behind everyday stress and some helpful ways to cope.
KATE BIBERDORF: Life update - I just made a pretty big, exciting but also super stressful change. After 16 years in Austin, Texas, I moved across the country and started a new job as the United States' first professor for the public understanding of science at the University of Notre Dame.
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BIBERDORF: I'm Kate the chemist.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: She's nationally known for breathing fire...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: ...Explosions...
BIBERDORF: Wow.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: ...And major TV appearances. And now her mission is to bring that same notoriety to Notre Dame.
BIBERDORF: A new school, a new home, a new job - the laundry list of stressful things felt endless. And when we checked in with you, you shared that there were a lot of things stressing you out, too.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: What do I want to do? What is my career going to be?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: The uncertainty.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Everyday life is stressful.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Is there enough money?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Driving.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Stacking my to-do list too high.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: The way people perceive me - that stresses me out.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: You know, am I taking care of the house and myself and this and that?
BIBERDORF: So I think we can all agree that stress is sometimes, unfortunately, a major part of life, and it can manifest itself in a number of different ways. It might be that uneasy feeling in your stomach, tiredness, or an inability to sleep, forgetfulness, maybe your heart racing, or headaches, even depression. Yet not all stress is bad stress. Some of us thrive on it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: Am I addicted to stress? I feel weird when I'm not stressed.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #11: There are certain levels of stress that you got to go through to grow as a person.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #12: When that adrenaline level kicks in, and you're - everything starts firing, ooh.
BIBERDORF: This is me. Like, when Al Roker says, please welcome to the stage, Kate, the chemist...
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AL ROKER: Kate, the chemist.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #13: Kate, the chemist.
BIBERDORF: ...I get this massive surge of adrenaline and dopamine, and that dynamic duo helps me perform on live TV. Yet for some introverts, there's not enough adrenaline on the planet to convince them to step in front of a camera. So I've always wondered, if we have the exact same molecules bouncing around in our bodies and brains, how can we have such different responses to them? And is our stress getting worse?
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #14: Could it be that a society gets so stressed out that it actually starts to break?
BIBERDORF: So I'll admit it. I'm kind of a control freak. And during my big move, all the things I normally can handle were just out of whack, and I was really struggling. I had a conversation with my friend, neurobiologist Kausik Si at the Stowers Institute, and asked him why I felt so off.
KAUSIK SI: I think in the modern life, we worry so much. We want to control every aspect of our life. And that's actually stress. We do not accept that the life has unexpectedness built within it.
BIBERDORF: The unknown can be scary, especially if you're uprooting your life to chase after your dream job.
SI: Many time in the modern life, our quest to be eternally happy - I think that causes a lot of stress on us. Any moment we are not feeling happy, we feel we are stressed, but I don't think we should equate those.
BIBERDORF: Kausik's point is that even in a healthy environment, anything that sets us off our path toward eternal happiness could cause us stress. And that's one of the reasons why stress is a really challenging topic for scientists to study. It's a nuanced area of brain research.
SI: Essentially, nobody would debate that the stress has an impact on how we function, how we form memory, how do we do anything. But what the debate is about - where the stress is exactly acting on.
BIBERDORF: So Kausik helped me connect with the queen of stress science herself, Dr. Rajita Sinha. She's a psychiatry and neuroscience professor and the founder of the Yale Stress Center, where a team of scientists are using brain images to collect stress data.
RAJITA SINHA: We quantify it many ways. It's multilevel, so you quantify the stressors people have faced. You quantify their body's response, you know, up and down, the signs and symptoms. All of this is new actually in many ways, so that's what's exciting about it.
BIBERDORF: So from a scientific perspective, how would you define stress?
SINHA: The experience of feeling challenged, feeling pressured, threatened or overwhelmed, or the pain and distress of that experience can all be part of what we think of when we think of stress.
BIBERDORF: What would a common stressor be?
SINHA: There are so many different types of stressors, right? Somebody is chasing you, threatening you in a way that you are - need to run for your life, or somebody, God forbid, points a gun at you or a weapon at you. There are, you know, climate-related stressors. You've got a hurricane coming. Your house is going to be exposed to some drastic external things. But there's work-related stress, and there's family stress balancing that. That's the pressure of, you know, you've got too much to do. But there are also internal stressors. So if your body is recovering from an illness or you are in acute pain or chronic pain or have, God forbid, extreme hunger or extreme sleeplessness, for example - those can all be situations that drive the stress response and that make us stressed
BIBERDORF: Biologically, is there a reason why we experience stress? So you talked about the gun example or running for your life. So what happens in those moments specifically?
SINHA: We have a very robust biology of stress. We have a hardwired response, a whole system and substrate for responding because we are wired for survival both individually to survive but also for a species.
BIBERDORF: Let's say you're going for a hike, and then suddenly a bear appears.
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BIBERDORF: In that split second, your amygdala, the part of your brain that handles our emotions, will send an SOS signal to your hypothalamus. I like to think of the hypothalamus as those 1950s telephone operators.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #15: Long distance.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #16: Operator.
BIBERDORF: It's the section of our brain that uses our nervous system to send lightning-fast messages to the rest of our body. That's how we know to freeze or run in an instant. That response is what we've come to call fight or flight, or tend or befriend. But Rajita says this is only one part of the stress response.
SINHA: Because if you think of the survival mode, that has very much driven the thinking about fight or flight and freeze. But that is not the only thing we do. We do a lot more than surviving. In fact, what we've learned - what the new science of stress - what I like to call the new science of stress - has taught us is that we're learning about cells and neurons, our brain cells, but cells in our body. And one of the things that's very critical, a main function of the biological stress system, is adaptation.
BIBERDORF: In fact, research out of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics shows that our cells know when we're in a stressful situation, and they form membraneless compartments that help us survive in the moment and then recover more easily after the stressor has been eliminated. However, it's possible that the trauma from the experience can stay with you and continue to cause you further stress. And what about the things in life that are constant?
SINHA: Yes, there's the one thing, and you took care of it. But now you can't run anywhere, and you can't sleep. Well, what is sleeplessness telling you? It's telling you - it's like a stress sign. People will say, but how do I know when I should care about it? You know, 'cause sometimes I'm stressed, and then I'm OK. I talked to my friend, and I'm fine. So we would say when it's not letting up, when it comes back, and it keeps coming back in the week, then that signal - your body is saying, wait a minute, I'm here. I'm here. Take care of me.
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BIBERDORF: When your body is sending off those alert signals to take care of yourself, that's when you need what Dr. Rajita Sinha refers to as a stress buster. For me, it's yoga or a kickboxing class. For my hubby, it's 30 minutes with this kindle.
Rajita, do you have some stress busters that you'd recommend?
SINHA: What I call the low-hanging fruit is what we should all be considering. Exercise is good. Talking to a friend or a family member, somebody you're close to - just talking - our body is actually wired to partake in these things to help us reset. Nutrition is really important. Being outdoors, being in pleasant environments - and then some people have other ways. Really ice cold towel on their face - or take even a cold plunge, which some people like to do. So there's lots of different stress busters. And, in fact, just as stress is uniquely individual in many ways, in the way that we experience it, the stress busters are uniquely individual.
I had one person - I said, well, what do you do to take care of your stress? And they go to a drumming class twice a week. Well, that's fantastic because when we break down the science of this, it's really neat because we use our muscles and our body to give - send signals up to the brain for resetting. And that is just beautiful.
DETROW: That was an excerpt from the KCUR podcast Seeking A Scientist, hosted by Kate the chemist. It is made possible by the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. You can hear more episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
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