Mrs Smith and the stress loop
As the Invercargill leg of her tour nears, Dr Libby Weaver tells Mary-Jo Tohill that the enemy within is to blame for some of our most common health complaints.
When Dr Libby Weaver was a little girl of four growing up in Tamworth, the New South Wales sister city of Gore, her mother gave her a journal.
‘‘I wrote things like how many eggs the chickens had laid, but it helped me get into the habit of writing down my thoughts.’’
Journaling also provided the seed for the celebrity nutritional biochemist’s new book The Invisible Load. The idea began to take shape a few years ago, when she began to write down her thoughts about what was really at the core of stress and how to get to the bottom of it.
Weaver will be in Invercargill on October 1 as part of her national ‘‘Overcoming Overwhelm’’ speaking tour, to unpack the load and talk about her take on stress.
‘‘I don’t think there was a single defining moment [of coming up with the topic],’’ she says.
‘‘I do my best to relieve people’s stress, to come up with ways to help, and to not put a Band-Aid on it.’’
She hasn’t got the chickens any more. She wishes she had.
The questions she puts to readers of her book are the ones she asks herself: What matters to you? What do you want your day to look like? How do you want to live?
Her own answer that last one is: ‘‘It would be with brown hens in the backyard, but it’s difficult because I travel so much. Maybe grow veges, in two to three years.
‘‘But I still write in my diary. It’s how I work things out in my mind.’’
She felt it was time for people to have a deeper talk about stress.
‘‘People walk around with the same conversation going on in their heads, but what if you could change how you think about things?’’
This is the whole premise of her book – that it is not things, people or tasks that cause stress, but thoughts.
For most of us, our lives are not like those of our generational predecessors, who lived through traumatic events such as world wars, she said.
Now the enemy was not at the gate – the enemy was within.
In her book, Weaver discusses why our stress levels are continuing to rise, and how what we think can be the cause of our suffering.
She says we each carry a load, made up of the thoughts, beliefs and choices that no-one sees, and these are invisible even to ourselves.
This results in a stress response, triggering the release of cortisol and adrenaline. The problem is that many of us are in a constant state of elevated stress.
Stress is actually fear, Weaver says. It means our brains are constantly asking: ‘‘Am I safe?’’
This is useful when we are about to step off a cliff and the fight or flight impulse kicks in. But an email pinging into our inbox often triggers the same response.
When our brain tells our body that we are not safe, it can lead to a raft of physical reactions from bowel issues to headaches to wakefulness to unpredictable appetite. ‘‘The nervous system orchestra spends most of it performance out of tune,’’ she writes.
One in five adults in New Zealand and Australia have high blood pressure, and one in five women have irritable bowel syndrome, largely because of our thoughts, she believes.
Constant cortisol elevation is exhausting and can also lead to conditions such as type-2 diabetes, increases in body fat, hypertension and loss of eyesight.
Weaver opts for an unwashed dishes analogy to illustrate how our thoughts can cause us stress. One day you’re walking past the pile of dishes.
You think to yourself, ‘‘I’ll get to that when I have time,’’ but on a bad day the overflow might make you decide that your whole house and life is falling down.
From the pile of unwashed dishes, to the person you are caring for, the unreturned phone calls or your body image, she invites us to examine the things that overwhelm us, and the way we think about them.
The other analogy she uses is the ‘‘Mrs Smith’’ syndrome.
You go to the supermarket. You see Mrs Smith. Mrs Smith ignores you and doesn’t say hello.
Your ‘‘old brain’’ kicks in: What have I done to offend Mrs Smith? Your thoughts take over. Your brain goes into a loop that keeps repeating: What have I done to offend Mrs Smith?
‘‘To stop the loop, you’ve got to ask yourself the question about the thought: Is it true?’’ Weaver says.
‘‘We’re not really taught this at school, to understand how our brains work . . . You are not your thoughts, and not everything you are thinking is true.’’
Suppose you were to look at the situation differently with your ‘‘new brain’’ thoughts, which tend to be more rational.
Maybe Mrs Smith was just having a bad day. Give it a day or two and at the next opportunity ask her how she is, or take her a cake.
But why do we care so much about what Mrs Smith thinks? What is actually at the bottom of it?
‘‘When we don’t have the perception of ourselves reflected back to us, it scratches the itch of our biggest fear, and that is lack of approval,’’ Weaver says.
‘‘We’re not really taught this at school, to understand how our brains work . . . You are not your thoughts, and not everything you are thinking is true.’’