Time Alone, Time With Others: The Two Key Ways to Reduce Stress

Feb 14, 2024

Mindfulness meditation and spending time with the people with love are the two best ways to reduce stress
Richard Sutton explores the research behind these stress-busting supports

The human stress response is immeasurably powerful. The mere perception of a threat or challenge is enough to engage numerous regions of the brain and cause a five-fold surge of norepinephrine and epinephrine in our bodies. This takes place before our visual system has even had time to register the events happening around us.

At the same time, there is a surge of hormones and proteins (neuropeptides) that ultimately trigger an enormous shift in neurological, metabolic and immune behaviours.

The stress axis is the body’s survival software that has effectively protected us against unimaginable threats for thousands of years. It is a ‘software program’ where four major systems become drastically enhanced (immune, cardiovascular, hormonal and nervous) in real time, giving us a range of abilities that can be likened to superpowers.

In an acutely stressed state, physical strength and explosiveness, endurance, mental acuity, focus and attention, pain resistance and abundant energy combine with heightened senses, providing a vehicle for incredible accomplishment. But as the saying goes – there are no free lunches.

This large-scale biological reorganisation is extremely taxing and can’t be sustained for long periods or with great frequency without an overwhelming cost to our emotional, mental and physical wellbeing. In fact, chronic or repeated activation of the stress axis will invariably lead to dysfunction, which may include overactivity, blunted responses, an inability to regulate responses and failure to shut down. It is fair to say that a significant percentage of the world’s mental and physical health challenges stems from stress axis dysfunction.

Childhood adversity and the stress response

Research shows that children who experience sexual, physical and emotional maltreatment, domestic violence, parental loss and separation, or neglect are prone to the development of physical health issues due to a dysregulated HPA axis. These health disorders include a higher prevalence of autoimmune diseases, obesity, cardiovascular disease and dramatically accelerated biological ageing.

However, it is in the mental health domain that the greatest vulnerabilities exist. In a large study looking at childhood adversity with associations to mental health disorders (depression, anxiety, disruptive behaviour and substance abuse), Harvard researchers found that 44.6% of childhood and 32% of adult onset mental health issues can be attributed to childhood adversity.

Stress axis regulation: It's easier than we think

Regaining control over the stress axis and dysregulated cortisol is important when looking to promote resilience. Fortunately, there are several ways to successfully achieve this, which include breathing exercises, strengthening relationships, nutritional supplements and dietary interventions, pharmaceutical agents, specific forms of exercise and activity, spending time in nature and lifestyle choices.

Remarkably, of the many strategies to choose from (including medication), social support and human connection shine the brightest. Take a moment to reflect on a time when you experienced a stressful event that really unsettled you and no matter how hard you tried, or how many deep breaths you took, you just couldn’t settle or self-soothe. And then someone close to you (a parent, partner or very close friend) walks into the room, your eyes connect and you immediately feel calmer and more secure. Their presence hasn’t necessarily removed the stressor or changed the external circumstances, but unbeknown to you it has influenced your biological and emotional state without a word of advice dispensed or any comfort given.

Social buffering

According to Megan Gunner from the Institute of Childhood Development at the University of Minnesota, what I have just described is a subset of social support known as social buffering. It is one of the most powerful ways to modulate stress perceptions and responses.

During early childhood, parents are the primary stress regulators for children, although a child’s temperament and their genetic make-up interact with parenting quality to predict their responses to fear, pain, trauma and uncertainty.

Parental support remains a potent stress buffer into late childhood, but it begins to lose its effectiveness by adolescence (10–19 years), something that every parent has come to (sometimes reluctantly) accept. Puberty and its associated hormonal changes appears to be the major switch that alters the potency of parental buffering. During this stage of life friends tend to serve as primary stress buffers, especially when social dynamics are the source of stress, which is often the case in those adolescent years. By adulthood, husbands, wives, life partners or very close friends assume this protective and critically supportive role.

The mechanism behind the profound effect of having supportive people in our lives and their role in buffering stress is not fully understood. However, what research has revealed is that there are at least two primary drivers in reduced stress axis activation and lower cortisol responses to adversity. The first influence emanates from brain behaviour and regional activation patterns.

Neuroimaging studies show that the mere presence of a close companion or family member reduces activity in the areas of the brain that process stress, fear, threat and pain. At the same time, the executive regions light up, showing cognitive control and authority over negative emotional experiences.

A simple analogy is to see our brain and its collection of distinct regions as individuals who make up a rugby team (or any team sport). In this team, each player has a specific position and key role to play. Under normal game conditions and against a weaker opponent, the team operates in total harmony, with every member understanding and fulfilling their respective roles and responsibilities.

However, in adversity and under more stressful conditions, there are some ‘players’ who are prone to basic errors, while there are others who simply thrive under such conditions. The emotional centres in our brain are those ‘players’ who tend to ‘fumble the ball’ and miss those all-important tackles, whereas the brain’s executive regions are the ‘impact players’ who soak up the pressure with relative ease. The stronger and more trained these ‘impact players’ are (ie, the better they engage, the more connected they are to the emotional circuits), and the more the team relies on them in challenging and pressurised situations, the better everyone’s overall performance and outcomes. In other words, resilience demands that intellect prevails over emotion.

While we don’t need science to affirm what we intuitively know, which is that having special people in our lives acts as safety cues that ultimately reorganise brain activity in favour of resilience and stress tolerance, it is certainly a nice validation. Perhaps this affirmation will nudge us to make a greater effort in reconnecting with those people we have lost touch with due to the social changes brought on by the pandemic in 2020. Or alternatively, it can serve as a strong reminder of the immense value that people hold in our lives and motivates us to show them more gratitude, appreciation and care.

Sadly, there are many people around the world who don’t have people in their lives who provide social buffering, let alone provide other forms of support during difficult periods. This stark reality exists for one-third of the world’s population who are currently experiencing considerable loneliness8 (the discrepancy between our desired and our actual social relationships).

Most of us would assume that Covid-19 is largely to blame for this existing global phenomenon. While it has dramatically amplified the burden, the loneliness crisis has been a global burden for some time. In 2018 the UK appointed the world’s first minister for loneliness.

The pressing question is how can we promote resilience and optimise brain activity and recruitment patterns when social support is lacking or non-existent? Fortunately, it is possible and very attainable with a little work and focused effort.

Although human connection is something we should all strive for, the strongest alternative to social support and human connection is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is essentially a practice of learning to monitor and accept things, two behaviours that are rare in our modern world.

Mindfulness parallels social support in reducing stress

Several studies show that higher levels of trait mindfulness are associated with reduced cortisol and lower stress reactivity under adverse conditions. In 2014 David Creswell, a professor of psychology from Carnegie Mellon University, published a paper that identified the core mechanisms through which mindfulness promotes resilience and reduces vulnerability.

Firstly, the practice increases the recruitment of executive regions (specifically the ventral and dorsal regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex) of the brain, which can indirectly reduce activity in stress processing areas. What Creswell and his team also discovered was that mindfulness directly reduces reactivity of the central stress processing regions (amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, hypothalamus). In other words, developing greater mindfulness will protect against obstacles, challenges, change, uncertainty, conflict or other major stressors from translating into mental and emotional vulnerability. Moreover, neuroimaging studies dating back to 2013 have found that mindfulness not only alters function and activity of the brain’s fear centre, but it also changes its entire structure.

If all these findings have not already convinced you as to the value and merits of mindfulness, then perhaps the fact that this form of meditation reduces connectivity of the stress processing centres within the brain might. The effect of this structural adaptation would be the reduced capacity to become emotionally incited by stress.

The lesson that can be taken from the research is that while social support is invaluable in helping us navigate life’s ups and downs, mindfulness comes in at a very close second.

Richard Sutton is the author of Thrive