The Resilience Insufficiency Trap

What is Resilience?

Resilience is your body’s capacity to absorb and to recover from stress.

Resilience is important, because it determines how your body responds to that stress. Highly resilient people can absorb enormous amounts of stress and they not only cope, they prosper. For people who have resilience insufficiency, even every day normal stressors can be enough to bring them down.

Having an insufficient resilience can trap you in a state of permanently recovering from stress, a situation that is persistent and very unpleasant. These stress related symptoms are very real, but are often not well explained by your doctor. If your doctors can't give a good explanation why your are in pain, fatigued and unwell, consider whether the cause of these symptoms may be a failure of your normal resilience.

A Broader Understanding of Stress

When people think of stress, many of us are thinking of emotional stress that might come from a demanding boss at work, from relationship issues at home or perhaps from emotional challenges, such as the death of somebody close to you.

But stress comes in many forms.

Exercise is physical stress. Eating junk food is nutritional stress. A viral illness is biological stress. Some of these things we can control, others such as hormone cycles, are happening in the background, often beyond our awareness.

These stressors affect us in every aspect of our lives, but this is not all bad news. Our constitution has evolved to handle these stressors. Our immune system, our hormones, our autonomic system and our joints, muscles and bones are all evolved to not only absorb stress, but to adapt and get stronger (more resilient) in the face of stress.

Unfortunately however, the reverse is also true. Too much stress and not enough recovery can result in adaptation in a negative direction. This leaves you weaker and less resilient. What’s more, if your resilience becomes inadequate for your daily lifestyle, even normal every day stressors can overwhelm your coping capacity. This produces stress responses that are not only unpleasant, they can make you sick. Symptoms include increased sensitivity, widspread body pains, emotional lability, poor sleep and fatigue. When these stress responses occur much of the time, it prevents you regaining your resilience. This can be a difficult problem to rectify.

Sensory Stress

One type of stress that is often not appreciated is sensory stress. Our sensory system is the connection between our brain and the outside world. Therefore the stress we experience from our environment is mostly transmitted through our senses.

When tested, individuals who struggle with ’medically unexplained’ symptoms are frequently found to be more sensitive than the normal population. In other words, their volume dial is turned up. The cause of this sensitivity can vary. While some people inherit sensitivity, others apper to aquire it as a result of chronic stress or acute trauma.

Being sensitive is not in itself a problem. It can even bring some advantages. But for sensitive people, an increased information load on your nervous system puts an increased demand on your resources. Depletion of these resources produces fatigue and inadequate resilience leads to sensory stress.

We have 5 well known senses including vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch, but there two more. The vestibular sense, is our ability to sense motion, and our sense of touch can be divided into two distinct systems. One senses how we feel inside (introversion). It includes our sense of hot, cold and of danger (nociception). The other senses what we feel in the world (extroversion) and includes our sense of texture, shape or vibration.

Any and all of these senses can contribute to sensory overload. If you understand this however, you can take steps to manage it. By recognising situations that challenge your senses, you can reduce your exposure or plan a better way to navigate them.

What is Sensory Processing Impairment?

Have you ever wondered why a pickpocket can remove something from you without you feeling it? The reason is that your nervous system is one big sensory filter. It is designed so that you only feel the sensations that are important for your functioning. By shifting your attention elsewhere, the pick pocket tricks your brain into interpreting the sensations from around your pocket as unimportant. Then your nervous system processes and deletes them.

Every minute of the day, billions of nerve endings send messages to your brain. If you had to experience all of them you would go crazy. Luckily most of it gets deleted and never reaches your awareness.

Sensory processing also enables you to separate one sensation from another. This is a beautiful skill. For example, your ears hear every single sound in a room full of noisy people. There might be 100 different sources of sound, but your brain can separate out and interpret the noises that represent the speech just from the single person to whom you are talking.

In some people however, this system doesn't work so well. You might find it hard to follow conversation in a noisy room. You might be aware of multiple conversations at the same time. Background noise might intrude upon your awareness. This also may affect your capacity to pay attention and and maintain concentration.

If you also suffer sensitivity, it is like turning up the volume on a cheap stereo, the output becomes distorted.

Impaired sensory processing is a difficulty in being able to filter background sensations or to differentiate one sensory signal from another. This not only creates more sensory stress on your system, it also demands extra mental energy to deal with it.

As with the pick pocket, the target of your attention determines what sensations you feel. Your ‘Attention / Focus’ mechanism activates your sensory filters. It is a core skill for effective sensory processing.

Although there is still limited research into how you might improve your sensory processing, it is possible that sharpening your attention and focus might prove beneficial. Mindfulness and meditation are two focus training strategies that have good evidence, demonstrating benefit for many symptoms.

Resilience, Sensory Sensitivity, Sensory Processing and Chronic Pain.

In symptomatic people, it is common that sensory processing impairment and sensory sensitivity are both evident. When these two problems are combined, it produces a double whammy of sensory stress.

Pain is a particular case when it comes to sensory stress. As it can be difficult to control, it often adds an extra burden to an already stressed system.

However, things are not so simple. Research has shown that intensity of pain is a poor predictor of disability.(ref needed) Indeed, many individuals report intense and unremitting pain, but continue to function well. These individuals may show increased sensitivity, but typically they also demonstrate effective resilience and competent sensory processing. The role of resilience appears to be a third factor in whether or not individuals suffer or become disabled.

Traditional therapeutic approaches tend to focus on reducing pain intensity and sensory sensitivity but unfortunately these interventions have limited success in improving function and quality of life. An alternative apporach is to focus on rebuilding resilience and improving sensory processing impairment.

Training Resilience

Resilience comes in many forms. There are as many types of resilience as there are types of stress. Resilience, when it fails, can therefore affect you in many different ways. The question is, can we rebuild that resilience?

We know that Physical Resilience can be trained. It is called ‘Fitness Training’. In fact, graduated exercise is often prescribed for people with chronic pain, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and other adaptive neurobiological disorders. Unfortunately, although it works for some, for many, it fails.

The problem is that physical exercise is stress, and adding stress to an already overwhelmed system can often make it worse.

Nonetheless, ‘Fitness Training’ is the best model we have for building resilience and we can learn a lot from it.

It is a poorly known principle, but exercise makes you weaker, not stronger. It is the recovery from exercise that makes you stronger. Working harder is not therefore the secret to success. With fitness training it is the balance between exercise and recovery that matters.

With this in mind, the Fitness Training Model for resilience building is simple. Apply stress to a system, create a stress response, then allow the system adequate time to recover. When recovered, do it again.

Getting the balance right between stress and recovery however, is not an exact science.

A hard workout takes a long time to recover, so you can do it only infrequently. On the other hand, small workouts can be done frequently because they allow a quick recovery.

The optimal exercise strategy will depend on your resilience and your ability to recover quickly.

Rebuilding resilience to other types of stress?

If fitness training works so well to build physical resilience, why can’t we apply the same principles to build resilience to other types of stress.

Sensory Resilience Training: involves combining optimal recovery with measured sensory challenges. These challenges can target any of your senses. An auditory challenge may involve exposing yourself to a noisy environment. Recovery for this might involve quiet time. Motion challenges might involve travelling in a car, or playing on swings and round abouts. Visual challenge could involve ball games. Different tasks will challenge different senses and the way you recover will also differ depending on the activity.

Social Stress: Can fitness training principles help reduce stress from social challenge? Social challenge might involve meeting other people, or even more challenging, with strangers. For some, public speaking might prove the greatest challenge. If you are socially challenged, you will feel social discomfort when doing it. This discomfort is different, but not unlike how you feel discomfort when challenging yourself with exercise. The principles are therefore the same. By consciously practicing activities that make you socially uncomfortable, you can build your social resilience, and increase your confidence to go out in the world.

Emotional Stress: Psychologists have studied emotional resilience for many years. Much of the research on resilence has been done in this domain. I wont get too much into this, except to say that sensory processing and emotional processing occurs in much the same regions of your brain. Sensory sensitivity and sensory processing impairment tend to go hand in hand with emotional difficulties such as anxiety and irritability. Sensory resilience and emotional resilience are therefore very much dependent upon each other. Rebuilding your sensory resilience will also have benefits for emotional resilence and may reduce these emotional difficulties.

Reducing Stress Load

The first step to facilitate recovery from a state of chronic stress response is to reduce your stress load. Just as for exercise, for any given activity, the more the stress load, the longer it takes to recover. By reducing stress load, or breaking it up into smaller bits, your recovery mechanisms can more easily bring your system back into balance.

To begin, identify the stressors that lay you flat. Knowing the contributors may enable you to start taking action to change them. Stress cannot, and does not need to be eliminated, it just needs to be reduced down to packages that your body can handle, at your current level of resilience. This is called pacing.

Of course, being told to “do less” may be very frustrating for people with low resilience. Usually fatigue and pain have already reduced your capacity to a level that is inconvenient or disabling. Life is also often demanding. Doing less is something that life will often not allow.

Pacing is not about doing less, it is about doing things differently. When its done well, less becomes more. Pacing requires discipline to do less in the beginning, but by the end of the day you will end up doing more. What’s more, if you recover quickly, you can do it again tomorrow.