How do I deal with stress in situations I can’t fully control?
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Hi, I'm Dr. Brian Goldman. Welcome to The Dose. Well, it feels like the nerve-wracking headlines just don't stop. There's a federal election for a leader who will best take Canada into a very uncertain future, new tariffs from the U.S., talk of annexation, and economic uncertainty. Many of these are stressful circumstances over which we have little, if any, control.

Now, Mental Health Research Canada says these factors are causing heightened anxiety among Canadians, me included. So this week we're asking, how do I deal with stress in situations I can't fully control? Hi, Zendel. Welcome back to The Dose. Thanks, Brian. Nice to be with you. Nice to be with you, too. True confessions time. How stressed out are you these days? Hard not to be stressed and concerned.

Yeah. And what's the first source of stress that comes to your mind? I just think the news that so many institutions that we believed in seem to be dismantled and how quickly that seems to be happening. Sometimes for me, it's where's the next outbreak of measles going to be? But interestingly, you know, a colleague, a medical colleague started waxing going on and on. He's much younger than me, still has a huge mortgage and is very concerned about the economic uncertainty of

So different people are reacting to this with different stressors. And we want to get into that conversation. But before we begin, can you give us a hi, my name is, tell us what you do and where you do it.

Hi, my name is Zindel Siegel. I'm a distinguished professor of psychology and mood disorders. I work at the University of Toronto in Scarborough. You're the person I really wanted to speak to on this topic. What's the current stress level around political and economic events since the start of the year, in your opinion? Oh, I think it's increasingly heightened and it's going to stay there for quite a while.

not just because of the impending election Canadians that we have to face, but also so much of the news from around the world that seems to be upending assumptions that we took for granted to help us feel some measure of stability and predictability in larger affairs that can have very personal impacts.

How much over and above the, you know, the many stressors that people encounter throughout their life cycle, aging parents, kids with school problems, leaky roof, you know, floods in the basement. How do the current events raise that level of stress over and above what we usually have to deal with?

It's hard to say exactly. I think what I would say is people have plans for getting through the things that are demanding and challenging. So at the very micro level, getting to work on time and dealing with traffic, getting the kids into daycare, balancing your checkbook and all of that. But I think this level of stress introduces an additional burden. And part of that burden is that you may have a plan for your personal life.

But some of these changes are things that you have very little control over. And one of the things that stress feasts on is a sense of uncontrollability and unpredictability. And we're all experiencing that now. I know that I can get into doom scrolling on social media quite quickly and quite deeply until I actually stop myself completely.

Why is it that we tune into negative information when we know it can stress us out? We're not tuning in. People are tuning into us. These social media platforms have been constructed very carefully from algorithms and information and data that's been gathered to really maximize outrage, fear, greed, envy. And these are emotions that set off huge alarms in our brains, right?

And what they do is they recruit attention. So doom scrolling, something that keeps happening because we keep paying attention because the stories and prompts that we see on social media have been curated to capture our attention. I mean, we're not being captured by attention of stories that are positive, uplifting. Maybe some of us are, and maybe some of our feeds reflect that. But by and large, the eyeballs move to stories that

that are carefully designed to get our attention, to pull it away, and to hold on to it for long stretches of time. So what effect do these kinds of stresses have on the body? Stress, I think, can be thought of, I mean, it's a huge term, but let's see if we can break it down into temporary stress and chronic stress. Temporary stress can actually be a good thing.

Something that gets you fired up to deal with the situation, harnesses your focus, your concentration, your motivation, maybe even your values, and you decide to do something about it. Maybe, you know, you want to make a difference. You know, the whole bi-Canadian movement may be as a response to the stress of being, let's say, belittled by Americans and showing that we can sort of flex our own willpower and our own values.

But the way in which stress becomes a little bit more concerning is when it becomes chronic, and then it leads to two effects in the body, either hyperarousal and increased vigilance, so that in a sense your body is acting as if it needs resources to put out a five-alarm fire every moment of the day.

And eventually that wears down your organ systems or stress can lead to shutdown where life becomes less interesting, things are less rewarding, it's harder to connect with people, it's harder to find meaning when you're overwhelmed by so many things that seem to be going wrong. And in that case, you're disengaging from the very sources of activity that your body needs. So temporary stress versus chronic stress,

And then chronic stress is the one that really can have difficult deleterious effects on the body. That's what can lead to increased blood sugar, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure.

Reduced immune response, even cancer. Yeah, because what happens is that your mind really can't distinguish between the true trigger for a full body stress response, which would be something threatening you, a tiger running at you, needing to think rapidly to get yourself out of a situation of danger, and the mind presenting yourself as

as being in danger because so-and-so in the U.S. said this, or the stock market seems to be having a very bad day again, or things in Europe, you know, changing radically the way you thought politics play out. That kind of ability of the mind to present to ourselves continual danger scenarios keeps our stress levels up and keeps relying on the body to produce results.

hormones and other physiological reactions that over time wear down and lead to the fraying of our organ systems. Zendel, I'm old enough to remember books by Hans Selye, you know, noted researcher in stress. And I remember reading frequently about the fight or flight response. And, you know, these days there's a third member of that group, the fight or flight response.

or freeze response, are they all kind of interrelated responses? What's going on inside the body with each of those? Those are important ways that we have of dealing with stress, but you can see them most clearly in the animal kingdom. Freeze is a way of pretending that you're dead. And so prey will sometimes freeze in order to deter predators from thinking that they are a suitable meal.

Sometimes we see freeze in social situations where people with social anxiety, public speaking anxiety, or other kinds of fears socially just freeze up. Their minds stop working, their memory doesn't help them recall things, and they just kind of, you know, freeze in the situation, and that can lead to impaired performance. Fight very naturally as if you have someone who you feel is an opponent who

is about to attack you, you might preemptively attack them. Flight is also seen a lot in anxiety, where people have strategies for escaping and avoiding situations that they feel harmful to them. So for example, someone who is worried that going into a movie theater might leave them trapped if there was a stampede out or a fire alarm, they might choose to sit right on the

exit aisle or in the last seat right near the aisle so that they could get out of there very quickly. That would be an example of an escape or a flight tendency. But, you know, it's good that you mentioned Hans Selye's work because he also spoke about the refractory phase of a stress response in which if you've exhibited fight, flight or freeze,

and you've done that, say, for half an hour, for an hour, two hours, or three hours, there's another period in which there's a letdown of the stress response, the refractory period, which allows you to regain your stability. The body resets itself to a kind of homeostasis. And then, you know, you're ready to

to meet other challenges. But both of these things work hand in hand. The stress response mobilizes you to deal with stress, but then after a period of time, there is the need for the refractory period where you can replenish your resources. If you don't have the refractory period, you end up leaving yourself very open to a chronic state of exhaustion.

It's easy to talk about things that stress us out as or paying attention to things that stress us out as something that is automatically deleterious or something to which we would have an aversion.

And yet I have the sense that some of us may be addicted to things that stress us, whether it's social media or announcements or information that could stress us out. Am I right? Absolutely. I mean, I think there was some early research on people preparing for surgery. These

These are people who had to undergo surgical procedures that were quite serious. And they found that there were a couple of different personality types that varied in how they coped with surgery. Some people wanted to read up all about the type of surgical procedure they were undergoing. And these studies, by the way, were conducted in the 60s.

Not today when you can actually watch a YouTube video of your actual procedure and see what's actually going on in the operating room. But they were wanting to talk about their surgery. They spoke about it to everyone. They got information and maybe they pestered the surgeons to tell them more or the nurses involved in the OR.

And so they were called the sensitizers. They didn't want to push any of that away. They wanted to gather as much information. Another group were called the suppressors, people who coped with impending surgery by not really wanting to talk about it until the day of, by just sort of

keeping information to a minimum, maybe having an outlook that, you know, que sera, sera, they're going to get through it. They didn't want to be reminded about it. They just lived their lives until they had to check in to the hospital. And so different coping strategies work for different people. It's possible that the people gathering the information about their surgery, or even today, the people that are reading every news article they can get their hands on and scrolling on media to get all different perspectives, maybe they feel that there's a kind of control

that they can generate by being as informed as possible. And other people might feel, well, you know what, I'm going to leave it up to these other forces that are swirling around me. I may not have total control over them, but I'm just going to let it go and see what happens. I don't need to spend all of my time doing it. So in a sense, they're minimizing the impact, but

Their own way of control might be to try to narrow the aperture through which all this information is flowing at them. What are some of the specific ways that we can manage stress that is induced by political and economic uncertainty and all of the announcements that we're hearing? It's like a barrage, while still remaining informed. Part of it is doing a bit of a check-in with yourself,

gauging the kind of stress that you feel you're being asked to shoulder. And I would say excess to what you ordinarily feel you need to do to manage your life. If that stress is something that you feel can be handled through accessible things that people do to look after themselves, exercise,

going for walks, getting out of your head and into situations that involve your body, maybe a yoga class, cold plunge, some way of activating sensations in lieu of activating just the thinking parts of the brain. That might be a kind of light touch way of helping you step out of some of this constant worry and thinking about things.

If you do find that you're worrying a lot and it's sort of taking over your day, then you might try something called stimulus control, which is a basic technique that's sometimes used for people that have sleep problems, which is give yourself a half hour or an hour every day

where you give yourself permission to worry about every single thing in the world that you feel is going wrong. And so that might be between 5 and 6 p.m. That's your worry time. You might even have a place in your house, like your worry corner, where you sit in the worry corner and just let the mind roam. And then if you start to fall into worries at 7, 8, or 9 o'clock at night, or even 11 in the morning,

see whether you can postpone that particular worry to your 5 to 6 o'clock slot or your 5 to 5.30 slot. So you're not getting rid of your worries. You're kind of postponing them to the period of time when it's okay to worry. And then when you encounter worries in the rest of your day, you can create some space to keep on going with your day knowing that you're going to get to it, but just not exactly right now. I

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Many of the things that you've been talking about have to do with our ability to tolerate distress, so-called distress tolerance. Can you define that? Distress tolerance is really important. And it comes from this recognition that although much of our experiences in the realm of emotions are

can be described as trying to tilt us towards positive experiences, positive emotions, good feelings, getting rid of the negative, you know, moving towards more affirming experiences.

there is the reality that sometimes to get there we need to move through experiences that are negative, challenging, and over which we may not have full control. And that sometimes even our landing place isn't necessarily going to be in the positive.

It might be in experiences that are challenging and even arduous. So, for example, if you're training for a 10K run, the stress tolerance involves feeling the strain, discomfort, and maybe even the pain in your body from pushing yourself, but feeling like you're willing to put up with that in order to engage in this valued action.

Distress tolerance may also be something where having a difficult conversation with a family member or a co-worker about their behavior may lead to some strong emotions being expressed at you. You might get blamed, you might get called out, but in the end it might be a very important conversation to have so once again you're willing to put up with the distress in order to act on something that has value to you. And this is a concept in our society that, you know, has been

I think it's been downplayed because you can't sell very much based on distress tolerance. You can sell a lot more things based on positive vibes and good energy and bliss and relaxation. So how might we develop some distress or increase our distress tolerance with respect to what we're hearing in the news these days? We don't want to minimize the way in which this can be hurtful to people, but

But I also think that it can be helpful for us to understand that in turbulent times, we may not be able to fix everything. And so the request that's being made of us in turbulent times is to find a way to become comfortable with things being turned upside down, with not knowing exactly at a global level, and trying to come to some understanding of our own personal impacts.

and to start from that as a place of planning and preparation for how we want to live our lives. The new cycle is always changing and providing us with more and more information. But what are the things that we know about our lives that allow us to at least have some stability, some continuity, some connection to other people?

and to see things that at a local level might not seem so dire as they are in terms of how things are represented more nationally or even internationally. I want to raise a topic that I guess has to do with personal boundaries. Suppose family or friends want to talk about current events, but we don't feel up to it or vice versa. We want to talk with people about these turbulent times and our usual go-to friends and family just don't want to talk about it. What do we do then?

I think it's already happening all the time. There are so many divisions that cut across

age, family, gender, political affiliations, that it's highly likely that people living under the same roof are going to have different opinions. Even the news sources people listen to seem to be divided according to age. And so I think that we have to recognize that people have different needs. There are some people who may watch something, they may watch a video, they may watch a graphic video,

and feel the need to talk about this with other people because maybe what they've seen that may be occurring in the video is traumatizing for them to witness. And so they want to talk to someone to maybe offload some of that reaction. Other people may want to protect themselves. Maybe they have their own traumas or their own experiences, and they don't want to hear about other people going through this again and again because it might be triggering for them.

And so use the word boundaries. And I think that that's very important. But I would also add to that the word shame. There should not be a mechanism in which people who do ask to talk about videos and are

asking for that to happen in a context where there's not a lot of interest, or people who don't have a lot of interest in watching these videos or being educated by watching these videos, either party shouldn't be shamed for their preference.

Approaching trauma or approaching difficulties that are being provided in graphic terms is something that is a very personal choice. And people shouldn't feel like they need to proselytize by involving people in watching these videos, or people shouldn't feel that their choices not to watch them indicates that they're limited or stunted in terms of their own political awareness. So boundaries and non-shaming, I think, is a good place to start.

Last question I want to ask you. A lot of us are watching what's going on with a certain degree of disbelief, a thought that, you know, that somebody's kidding. This is just all going to go away in a month or two. But what if the current uncertainty goes on for one or two years? What then? I think we're in very new territory.

And my hope is that there can be some progression in the belief in leadership for this country to be able to steer its course through these uncharted waters. I think that part of what we're experiencing now as Canadians is a profound sense of starting to pull together

And that pulling together, I think, has been spurred on by seeing us as under an external form of threat. I think that's been good in the sense that it's a good reaction. I don't think the threat's good, but it's there, as you said. And if this continues, then we will have to

negotiate ourselves through these next coming years to try to emerge afterwards in the best possible way. And in the meantime, we owe it to ourselves to try to

look after the people that we're connected to, and to look after each other, and to recognize that stress can be part of the equation, along with the headlines, and along with the surprises that we may find along the way. And stress is something that is our agenda, for us to look after ourselves, to access these light touch, or if needed, little bit more formal kinds of supports that are out there for helping us live through stress and to live through stressful times.

To everything you've said, I would add, if we think we can't handle it, remember what our parents and grandparents, maybe great-grandparents, were going through during the Second World War. We know that it lasted six years because it's in the rearview mirror, but they didn't. They didn't know in 1939 or 1940 or 1941 or 1942 when it was going to end, how it was going to end, and they managed to get through it. I think that's a very apt question.

analogy, because at the same time, we don't know how long this is going to last. And I think we told ourselves that those days have come and gone. But as you say,

It's really hard to know what the future holds. I think it's reassuring to know that, at least in the past, we had the resilience to deal with it. And I would hope that we will again. Professor Zendel Siegel, thank you so much for speaking with us on The Dose on a really important subject. You're very welcome, Bright. Thanks for asking me. Zendel Siegel is a distinguished professor of psychology and mood disorders at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.

Here's your dose of smart advice: The current political and economic landscape is causing heightened anxiety among Canadians. Uncertainty regarding current events triggers different responses in different people. The fight-or-flight response leads to the release of stress hormones that cause your muscles to tense and for your heartbeat and breathing to increase. Some people don't fight or flee, they freeze. The stress response causes them to feel stuck in place.

Evolution gave us these bodily stress responses to cope with acute or imminent dangers like being chased by animal predators. These responses weren't designed to help us deal with economic uncertainty brought on by tariffs. Chronic exposure to stress can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, an increased risk of cancer as well as anxiety and depression. People who come from more marginalized groups may experience heightened fear and increased feelings of vulnerability.

You can't control current events, but you can control how they affect you. Here are some things you can do. Set limits on your consumption of media. Instead of watching the news constantly, set specific times like 15 minutes in the morning and evening to see what's going on. Instead of worrying constantly about things you can't control, try setting aside 20 or 30 minutes a day of worry time. Take care of your physical well-being by exercising, eating right, and trying to get proper sleep.

Remember that exercise is not all or none. Five or ten minutes of walking, swimming, stair climbing or stretching can make a big difference. Practice mindfulness by taking walks in nature and by doing breathing exercises. If your distress is more severe or if these tips aren't helpful, see your healthcare provider. This may be the beginning of a long period of uncertainty and stress. Building healthy habits now could make a big difference in the long run.

If you have topics you'd like discussed or questions answered, our email address is thedoseatcbc.ca. If you liked this episode, please give us a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. This edition of The Dose was produced by Prapti Bhamania and Samir Chhabra, our senior producers, Colleen Ross. The Dose wants you to be better informed about your health. If you're looking for medical advice, see your health care provider. I'm Dr. Brian Goldman. Until your next dose. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.