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Okay. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to calm your caveman today. We're going to pick up where we left off last time. We were talking about anxiety master key concepts. We talked a couple episodes ago about how you need a master key for your anxiety which is essentially a fundamental tool, a foundational tool that can help you to answer what to regulate and how to regulate. It can help you to know which emotions are helpful for you and which are harmful, and it can help you to know how to change those emotions if they are harmful.
So we talked about how the appraisal theory works really well as this master key, because it's able to help us answer these questions that we asked. And last time we focused on how the appraisal theory helps us to answer the first question, what we should regulate. And a little bit about how it helps us to answer the second question, how we should regulate. And we talked last time about how knowing what to regulate stems from knowing why we have emotions in the first place, why they evolved. We talked about how they evolved to help us adapt to our environment, to help motivate useful responses to our environment. And we compared ourselves to simpler species like sea anemones that have reflexes. They have rigid reflexes rather than emotions. And these rigid reflexes, give those creatures fixed action patterns, certain ways that they always respond to given stimuli. These action patterns are rigid and so they are not adaptive. And so there can arise situations in the environment where the species, the animal is not able to respond in a way that can adapt, that can save itself, that can help it to thrive. So in humans we have an evolutionary advantage in having emotions because emotions, rather than giving us fixed action patterns that are rigid, they create action tendencies without this rigidity that we see in reflexes. They just.tend, they help us tend to act a certain way without rigidly controlling us to act that way. They allow for more flexibility. Flexibility in two key areas. Flexibility in interpreting the event and flexibility in choosing the response to the event. And we talked about how sometimes emotions can be helpful. And sometimes they can be harmful. Sometimes they can help us to adapt and sometimes they don't help us to adapt. So emotions can be helpful or harmful depending on the circumstance, depending on the context, but most of all, depending on your goals, in the situation. And so the way that we determine whether an emotion is helpful or harmful, is in asking, does this emotion help me toward what is most important to me, toward my goals, toward my needs, toward my desires, toward my concerns? And if the answer is no, that's when we know that it would be good to try and regulate or influence some kind of a change in that emotion , to help us to respond more adaptively.
Okay. And in addition, last time we talked about how emotions are processes. Emotions are not fixed states. They are not set in stone. Here's a quote from Phoebe Ellsworth, Dr. Phoebe Ellsworth. She's a psychologist at the university of Michigan, and this was published in Emotion Review in 2013. And she said that "...appraisals and emotions are not frozen in the moment of initial perception, but constantly evolve as other beliefs, values, memories come to mind and as the situation changes." And we tried to illustrate this last time with two imaginary situations, one of the person with the dog that's barking and the other with the person who has an apple fall on their head. And we talked about how in both of these situations, the person originally interpreted the situation one way, which triggered a certain emotional response. But then with additional information from the environment, from the situation, their interpretation or their appraisal of the situation changed, and that changed their emotion. And so this illustrated how emotions are not rigid, they are not set in stone. They are not like pools of water. They're more like a running stream. This is a comparison that Phoebe Ellsworth made in her article. And emotions are organized by our appraisals of the situation. We talked about how this is how the appraisal theory gets its name. Because our emotions are organized by our interpretation of how this situation is going to affect us, the story that our brain tells about what this situation means for our wellbeing. And these appraisals are not frozen in the moment as Dr. Ellsworth explained, they are not set in stone, but they are open to re-interpretation of the event, re-interpretation of our response. They are malleable. Appraisals are malleable because they are processes. Emotions are processes. They're always in flux and so they can be influenced. They can be changed. But our appraisals, just to review, our appraisals organize our emotions. And we talked very briefly last time about how those appraisals, how those interpretations, those personal interpretations of the events that we're in can be directly and indirectly changed. We can work on them directly by working on the story that we're telling in our head. We can change that story that we're telling somehow. And we can also work on them indirectly by changing some aspects of the situation that we're in. Because then this changes the situation that we are appraising.
K, so that's our quick summary of what we talked about last week, just so that you're caught up to where we were. And now today we get to talk about, we get to dive a little deeper into what appraisals are made of. Isn't it interesting that we talked a little bit last time about how our appraisals happen all the time, but most of the time they are unconscious. Our bodies can't afford to be conscious of everything that we do. We can't be conscious of every heartbeat. We can't be conscious of every breath. We can't be conscious of how our blood vessels constrict , or relax in order to regulate our blood pressure. If we had to be conscious of every unconscious process in our, in our bodies, our brain would be so full of information that we wouldn't be able to do anything in the outside world. We wouldn't be able to function. And appraisals often fit into this unconscious category. They end up being unconscious. Our brains ask certain questions about the situation that we're in. They ask and answer certain questions. And according to those answers, They organize an emotion. Now the appraisal theory is very useful because it has identified what these questions are that our brains ask. Our brains ask them. It's normal. It's what we do all the time, but isn't it funny that we don't always know what these questions are. And so it can be really useful to begin to understand what the questions are that our brains ask when we appraise a situation, when our brain interprets the situation, how it's going to affect us.
Now this information that I'm going to give you is going to be in a table on on the video version. But for those of you listening to the audio version, I will include a PDF of this table, and a link in the show notes on my website, Calm your caveman.com. And you can look that up and look at the table afterwards if you want to. But this information all comes from an article by Uusberg et al from 2019 in Emotion Review. And it's an article called Reappraising Reappraisal. And they detail how appraisal theorists have identified what we call appraisal dimensions, which are different categories or different things that our brain analyzes when it is making an appraisal. There are basically three categories of questions that our brain is going to ask and answer when it makes an appraisal, that is then going to determine the emotion that we experience. Here are the three appraisal dimensions. The first one is called desirability. Meaning how desirable is this situation for my goals? How pleasant is it or unpleasant? How desirable is it? The questions related to desirability are how good or bad is this situation? Is it going to help me or hurt me? And how much? These are the questions that our brain asks that are in that desirability dimension. It asks and answers these questions. How good or bad is it? Is it going to help me or hurt me? And how much? Now the second appraisal dimension is called attribution and it has to do with, how did I get here? How much of this situation is my responsibility. And how much of it is due to someone or something else. Whose fault is it? The third dimension is expectancy, which has to do with how is this going to develop. And the questions that your brain asks are, what should I do? How will this situation evolve? And what could I do about it? Or in other words, What's the likelihood. What, what do I foresee happening and how am I going to be able to cope with this? So just to review, these are the main questions that your brain asks, how good or bad is the situation? Whose fault is it? And what should I do? These are the three main categories of questions that your brain will ask an answer unconsciously, most of the time, in every situation. And according to the answers that your brain gives, it will organize an emotion. So it's important to understand these questions because once you know, What the questions are behind your appraisal, which is organizing your emotion, you can start to find strategies that can modify the answers that your brain is giving to these questions. And these are the places where we can interfere and modify our experience by changing our answers to these questions.
Now we're going to delve a little bit deeper into appraisal. This chart that I just talked about for you was appraisal of emotions in general. This is a general questionnaire that your brain answers when it's creating. Um, emotions generally. It applies generally to all types of emotions. We are now going to get into more specifically the appraisals that happen in your brain, most of the time unconsciously, when we are talking about a specific type of situation, when we're talking about stressful situations. Stress. Okay. And anxiety fits into the stressful situation category. So we're now talking about a sub category of appraisals, and we're going to learn a little bit better. How your brain goes about appraising stressful situations.
Now, first of all, we have to define stress. What is stress? Well, I like to use Richard Lazarus's definition of stress. Lazarus and his colleagues are really the pioneers of research in stress and coping. And really all of the leading models of stress and coping in the areas of psychology and affective science are really all directly informed by Lazarus and his colleagues' work on appraisal, stress and coping. So that's why I like to use his definition. Here's his definition of what stress is. This is from a publication by Lazarus and Folkman. They say that "stress is a particular relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as either taxing or exceeding their resources.” So this is the key to define stress. The person in the situation, appraises the situation as this is either going to tax my resources or this is going to exceed my, really my resources.
It's going to be one of those two things. Those are the two directions that stressful appraisals can go. And Lazarus further detailed in a publication in 1991 that when the brain appraises that your resources are up to the demands, it produces what the, he calls a challenge response. When your brain on the other hand, determines that your resources are exceeded by the demands, your resources are not up to the demands, the demands are too much for you, then it produces what we call a threat response. So basically when your brain is appraising stress, it's asking how good or bad is this?
Well, the answer is it's bad. It's bad. This was either going to de tax or exceed my resources. And then your brain asks, how is this going to evolve? And what can I do? It basically says, what are the demands of the situation and what are my resources and how are they going to interact? Are my resources going to be up to these demands? Or are these demands going to exceed my resources? So it's really helpful to understand that when we have stressful situations, this is how our brain goes about appraising them. And this is crucial for understanding anxiety. We're going to talk about this specifically a little bit more in the next little bit, but we're going to now open up another chart because I want to explain to you the difference between a challenge response and a threat response.
We talked about how a challenge response is when your brain thinks that your resources are up to the demands. We've got enough to do this. We can do it. It's going to be tough, but we can do it. The threat response happens when your brain decides I don't have enough for these demands, these demands are too much for me. I can't do it.
These two different types of appraisals will organize two very different responses in the body to very different emotional responses. And these emotional responses include a motivational component, they include a feeling component, they include a physiological component. And this chart, which will be, there will be a link for you who are just listening. There'll be a link in the show notes so that you can see this chart as well, but this chart helps us to understand the difference in our bodies, the difference that in the responses that these two appraisals organize. So first of all, we'll talk about the challenge response. When your brain decides I've got the resources to meet these demands, I can do it. Then. You end up having a motivation to approach the stressor. You feel like meeting it, you feel like, okay, I can do this. I'm going to approach this. I'm going to do it. It's going to tax me, but I'm going to do it. As far as the feeling that you have. You have a feeling of pride or excitement. Now on the physiological level, the neuro-endocrine and autonomic reactivity, we have hormones produced that are related to thriving and growth. We have increased cardiac efficiency with the result of having more blood and oxygen delivered to peripheral areas, including your brain. What does this mean for performance for cognitive performance? It means that when you have a challenge response, you have facilitated cognitive performance. Basically the challenge response helps mobilize your physiological resources. To me to rise to the occasion, to meet the challenge. It facilitates your performance. It helps you do better than you would without this challenge response, it helps you to meet the stressor. And one other interesting fact. Is the recovery from this response. After the stressor has passed, the recovery is fast. We're able to return quickly to a baseline. When we have a challenge response, this is important because , we all have heard that having sustained levels of stress is not healthy. So a challenge response is great because our resources, our body mobilizes our resources to meet the stressor and then quickly returns to baseline once the stress is over. The stress response, doesn't linger. So that's the challenge response.
Okay. Now we're going to talk about the threat response. The threat response again is when your brain decides, I don't have the resources to meet the demands in this situation. So I'm in trouble. And so how, what kind of motivation does it produce? What kind of motivation does it organize? We feel like avoiding the stressor. We feel like defending ourselves from the stressor. It's not approach. Challenge makes us feel like approaching. Threat makes us feel like avoiding and defending ourselves from the stressor. The feeling component is anxiety and shame. And the physiological component is, as far as hormones go, we have a lot of cortisol produced. Now, cortisol is also produced in the challenge response. We have adrenaline and cortisol, but there's a lot more cortisol produced in the threat response. Now cortisol itself, isn't bad. We know that we need cortisol for different processes in our body. But you may have heard that sustained high levels of cortisol can be very detrimental to our health. And so in this threat response, we have a lot more cortisol produced. And it doesn't go away quickly. If you look down at the bottom where it talks about recovery, the stress response lingers in a threat response. So even after the stressor is gone and we're not threatened anymore, the stress response, the levels of cortisol remain elevated in our bodies. And so that can be harmful for our health. additionally physiologically the threat response triggers lowered cardiac efficiency. We have lower cardiac efficiency and less blood and oxygen delivered to the brain. It ends up being concentrated in the core areas. Our bodies basically are trying to minimize loss, minimize damage. It's kind of like a response that you might need when you're being attacked by a predator and you can't run away anymore. And you just need to minimize blood loss and protect yourself from damage as much as possible. That's basically what the body's trying to do in a threat response. And so it. Prioritizes blood in the core areas of the body takes it from the periphery, including your brain. And that means debilitated cognitive performance. You're not going to think very well when you're in a threat response.
All right. So we have these two different responses, the challenge response, and the threat response, based on two different appraisals. Either my resources are up to the demands, that's the challenge response, or the demands are bigger than my resources, that's the threat response. And depending on your situation, one response or another might be more adaptive. The response that will be most adaptive, whether challenge or threat, will depend on your situation and your goals and in that particular situation. I can imagine a situation in which the threat response would be more adaptive. Maybe you're being attacked by a predator, like we've referenced. Maybe you really can't get away. Maybe you really need to minimize blood loss, and playing dead and bringing blood into the core areas of your body are really the best possible options there. So threat response sometimes can be adaptive, but in our modern day, the stresses that we meet in our modern day environment, normally don't fall into this category where the threat response would be the best. Usually when we're under the kind of stress that we meet nowadays, it helps to have our brains working. Usually it helps to rise to the occasion to meet the stressor rather than avoiding or defending ourselves from the stressor. But that has to be determined on an individual level, of course, according to your goals in the situation. But it's really important to understand these two responses and the different appraisals that are behind them. Because if you determine that you're having a response that is not adaptive in your particular situation, then you can know, and, you know, especially if we're talking about anxiety, then you can know if I want to regulate this anxiety, if I want to change this anxiety in some way, then I will need to work on my brain's appraisal of my demands and my resources. I will need to work on the way that my brain is answering these two questions: how bad are these demands? And how strong are my resources? What is my coping potential? The way that your brain answers these two questions will determine your appraisal. So if you want to change your appraisal, you're going to work on answering those two questions. In a different way.
It's also interesting to note that this research helps us understand that stress isn't necessarily harmful. It really depends on what our goals are in the situation. And physiologically it depends on your appraisal of the stressor. Stress can actually facilitate performance. It can help you rise to the occasion. And it can be healthy for you in some measure, depending on your appraisal of the stressor. If your appraisals are repeatedly threat response related, then it may be harmful for you in the longterm, as far as your health. But stress itself is not harmful. It's the appraisal of the stressor that makes the difference. Your appraisal of the demands to the resources. Now I've framed the explanation of these two responses as if they were really distinct black and white, but that's not really the way that it works in our brains. And you've probably noticed that you can have both a challenge appraisal and a threat appraisal happening at the same time. You can have a mixture of challenge and threat going on. Or it can also be kind of more like a continuum where you have challenge on one end and threat on the other end. And you're somewhere along this continuum in the middle, maybe you're closer to challenge, but you've got a little bit of threat in there. Or maybe you're closer to threat. But in any case, the point is that your brain is appraising the balance between your demands and your resources. And that changing your emotion means changing your perception of that balance to be able to cultivate more of a challenge response when that's what you want.
Now that's a lot of information for one day. We're going to stop here, but I'm going to also give you a little addition to the exercise that I gave you last week. Remember last week, how we talked about how it can be really helpful for you to set an alarm and ask yourself maybe three or four times a day, how am I feeling? What are the emotions that I'm feeling right now? So that you can become more aware of the fluctuations in your emotions from moment to moment. Ask yourself, how am I feeling? And then the next question is why am I feeling this way? Why do I think that I'm feeling this way? So the how helps us become more aware of our emotions. The, why am I feeling this way helps us to become more aware of the appraisal behind the emotion that we're feeling. The appraisal, our mental story, our mental evaluation or interpretation of our situation that is creating the emotion that we're having. So this week, you can add a little addition to this second part. The, why am I feeling this way? You can start to analyze. What are my resources and what are the demands in this situation. You can start to become more aware of your demand resource balance, the way your brain perceives it. You can become conscious of how your brain is seeing the demands and the situation and your resources. So when you are feeling some kind of a stress related feeling, you'll want to ask yourself, am I feeling like approaching this stressor or am I feeling like avoiding or defending myself from this stressor? And that can already help you identify am I in a challenge response? Or am I in a threat response? Because I, if I feel like approaching the stressor, then I'm having a challenge response. My body is feeling like rising to meet the stressor. If I'm feeling like avoiding and defending myself from the stressor, then I'm having a threat response. And you can start to identify, well, if I'm having a threat response, that means that my brain thinks that the demands in this situation are too much for me. If I'm having a challenge response, it means that my brain feels like I've got what it takes to deal with the situation. And you can start to become aware of what your brain sees as the demands and the resources at your disposal. And this increased consciousness of your demand resource balance will then help you be in a good position to be able to manipulate and modify your perception of that demand resource balance so that you can change your emotion. You can change your threat response when you determine that what you really need right now is a challenge response.
So once again, I'll put links to the articles that I referenced here. I'll put links to those in the show notes. I will also put links to the diagrams that we talked about here so that you can look at those. Just go to my website, calm your caveman.com and click on the podcast tab. And you'll find those there. Now next week, we're going to continue our exploration of the master key concepts. So don't miss it. See you next time.