Dr. JF Brosschot is a professor of health psychology at Leiden University. He is one of the first to show that stress affects the immune system. Through his research of psychophysiological mechanisms of stress in daily life, while researching stress as a worldwide epidemic, Brosschot also recognizes the importance of where all this stress stems from and why this is happening. Now, his specific inquiry of how unconscious and prolonged physiological stress responses affect our mental and physical well-being has opened up the conversation to mental health and its tangible effects.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So the subject of your work is something we've really been reflecting on recently, more particularly during the pandemic. There was this stress that we've all gone through. And you identify this as affecting our health, our lives, and our productivity on so many levels?

JF BROSSCHOT

So social animals need to be connected. Lonely animals show chronic stress responses and die earlier if these needs are not met. Now, what are our concrete, non-negotiable needs? How many friends are enough to keep our default stress response down? Our social media needs, the need to talk, touch, and so on? And what physical spaces do we exactly need? How much nature do we need to be in? Stress science needs to stop studying stressors and focus on what we need to be healthy. Finally, this is not only health. It reduces our general performance, our cognitive flexibility, our creativity and exploration, our mood, and our libido.

Chronic stress response means continuously high blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormone level. So why, for example, do lonely people show a chronic stress response when they experience hardly any stressful events? And why do people with a history of early life stress show a continued chronic stress response in their adult life? And the same question can be asked about discriminated minorities or living in an urbanized area without parks or green environments around them. Why do people in these situations fall sick earlier and die prematurely?

So several years ago, my colleagues and I got a new insight that may help to explain these responses. It's based on neurobiology and evolutionary science, and these insights are that the stress response is not a response triggered by stressful events but a default response that is always on but normally inhibited when safety is perceived by the so-called prefrontal brain. In other words, it's all about being better safe than sorry.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I think that part of that stress is fear of the unknown. And when we talk about building resilience, we mean that we know that we can overcome something. We know we can survive.

BROSSCHOT

If you have a very good early childhood you can handle so many things in life, and that's reversed if you were emotionally neglected in your first couple of years, which gives you an unconscious mistrust of the world. And sadly that is extremely difficult to heal. You can much more easily heal a simple phobia. So if your mother was stressed during pregnancy or if you are born with a stress system that's already responding a little more strongly.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

As you think about the future, education, stress, wellbeing, and how we can live lives of greater purpose and meaning, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?

BROSSCHOT

I think that from my perspective as a stress researcher, young people should engage in training themselves with meditation and think hard about what they want later in life. Not everything is about earning money. And I would like to see young people in schools be more in contact with nature. Go outside and see what nature does for you. I mean, for us. When I was younger it was so natural to go outside and play in the green. In this little village where I live, there are many places where the kids can play, but we never see them. In the last 20 years, we never see them outside. That cannot be good. They should go outside not only for their mental health, which reduces stress, but also to learn what nature does for their immune system when they play outdoors. And the other is to refrain from so much social media. It's so important. We have to get them off of their smartphones to learn to deal with the real world and find real friends.

There are so many things that I would like to see in the future, including the outcomes of research into it. For instance, things like Tinder and the ways that young people find their partner for life. It's my impression from my broad network that very view of these digitalized friends or partner apps work simply because there are so many things that are important, in touch and smell and the direct nonverbal communication of the body also that you don't see in all these things, that's so extremely important. So I think that many of these apps will simply not survive. That's my optimistic view, again, because young people will learn that this is not the way that they get to the important things in life.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Sarah Dickerson.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).