How to make stress your friend

[RedFox]

It is a particularly interesting thread to pull on - I've been working from several angles but the biggest one being was that of 'will power/over-coming stress' and why (when the data above suggests that intermittent stress is strengthening) in some cases does even the slightest bit of stress seem problematic.
I'm the sort of person who can override things and push through stress, so my personal take was why was that wrecking me rather than making me stronger?
Gabor Mates work offers clues, but still didn't help me 'get over myself'.

So - will power (or energy needed to engage system 2):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower draw upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up.[1] When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired, which would be considered a state of ego depletion. In particular, experiencing a state of ego depletion impairs the ability to control oneself later on. A depleting task requiring self-control can have a hindering effect on a subsequent self-control task, even if the tasks are seemingly unrelated. Self-control plays a valuable role in the functioning of the self on both individualistic and interpersonal levels. Ego depletion is therefore a critical topic in experimental psychology, specifically social psychology, because it is a mechanism that contributes to the understanding of the processes of human self-control.
[..]
An experiment by Segertrom (2007) and Solberg Nes, has shown that HRV (heart rate variability) is a marker for both ego depletion, and an index for self-control power before the task. [1]

The underlying neural processes associated with self-control failure have been recently examined using neurophysiological techniques. According to cognitive and neuroscientific models of mental control, a "conflict-monitoring/error-detection system" identifies discrepancies between intended goals and actual behaviors.[9] Error-related negativity (ERN) signals are a waveform of event-related potentials, which appear to be generated in the anterior cingulate cortex when individuals commit errors in various psychological tasks.[10] Using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, Inzlicht and Gutsell found that individuals who had undergone an emotion-suppression task displayed weaker ERN signals compared to individuals who had not undergone emotion-suppression tasks.[9] These findings demonstrate preliminary evidence that depletion experienced after exerting self-control, can weaken neural mechanisms responsible for conflict monitoring {we can think about this in terms of personal developmental history - what did you learn to suppress as a kid that is now an automatic habbit? how is that effecting your HRV?}

Influences and factors[edit]
Positive affect[edit]
In a recent experiment, it was shown that inducing a positive mood can buffer the impairing effects of ego depletion on subsequent performance.[11] Positive mood was induced by getting individuals to watch comedy videos or by giving them a surprise gift. Positive mood seemed to allow people to recover faster from ego depletion and furthermore, improved their ability to self-regulate. There is no claim that positive mood can provide a general benefit to people who had not previously engaged in self-regulatory tasks; rather, positive mood can restore depleted individuals’ capacity to self-regulate. Furthermore, this experimental work does not consider in depth the mechanisms by which performance is restored. It is not known whether positive mood counteracts ego depletion or whether positive mood merely motivates an individual to persist in a task, despite their depleted state.

The ego depletion effect itself (without mood intervention), has however been shown to be unrelated to mood changes, as shown in multiple ego depletion experiments that either controlled for mood, or saw no mood changes. Thus, positive affect is just a way to counteract ego depletion after a person is depleted.

On laughter: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22894892

RESULTS:
Participants showed improved immediate mood (vigor-activity and friendliness) and increased HRV after the laughter intervention. Both the laughter and control interventions appeared to improve longer-term anxiety. Two participants awaiting a lung transplant dropped out of the study, and no adverse events occurred.

Guilt and prosocial behavior[edit]
Ego depletion has also been implicated in guilt and prosocial behavior. The feeling of guilt, while unpleasant, is necessary to facilitate adaptive human interactions.[12] The experience of guilt is dependent on one’s ability to reflect on past actions and behaviors. Ego depletion has been shown to hinder the ability to engage in such reflection, thereby making it difficult to experience guilt.[13] Since guilt typically leads to prosocial behavior, ego depletion will therefore reduce the good deeds that often result from a guilty conscience. In the study by Xu and colleagues, some participants were required to suppress their emotions while watching a movie about butchering animals, which resulted in a depleted state.[13] Participants were then induced to feel guilty by playing a game in which an opponent player was blasted with loud, unpleasant noises when they made errors. At the end of the experiment, participants were given a chance to leave money for a subsequent participant and were also given the choice of making a charitable donation. These were the measures of pro-social behavior. The results of this study indicated that people who experienced ego depletion felt less guilty and donated less money than non-depleted people. This demonstrates that ego depletion has an indirect effect on prosocial behavior by decreasing one’s ability to experience guilt.

Perceived levels of fatigue[edit]
An individual’s perceived level of fatigue has been shown to influence their subsequent performance on a task requiring self-regulation, independent of their actual state of depletion.[14] This effect is known as illusory fatigue. This was shown in an experiment in which participants engaged in a task that was either depleting or non-depleting, which determined each individual’s true state of depletion. Ultimately, when participants were led to believe their level of depletion was lower than their true state of depletion, they performed much better on a difficult working memory task. This indicates that an increased perceived level of fatigue can hinder self-regulatory performance independent of the actual state of depletion.

If you have (or had) a chronic illness/depression etc where levels of fatigue where always high, your perception of your capacity will be diminished from the (emotional) memory of these experiences. Even if these conditions have been cured, the perceived (remembered) fatigue levels can become self fulfilling. i.e. you can't handle stress.
This can be a catch-22.
Depressed people tend to have lower HRV, avoid social interactions, have poor self image etc - if HRV is your will power capacity (capacity to change) and depression results in low HRV (less capacity to change) your beliefs that you are 'worthless' (social disconnect) because you 'can't change' can be reinforced (drive the HRV lower).

Motivation and beliefs[edit]
Ego depletion has been shown to have some rather debilitating consequences, most notably self-regulation impairments. These effects can, however, be temporarily buffered by external motivations and beliefs in unlimited willpower. An example of such an external motivator was demonstrated by Boucher and Kofos in 2012, where depleted participants who were reminded of money performed better on a subsequent self-control task.[15]

An experiment by Carol Dweck and subsequent work by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs has shown that beliefs in unlimited self-control helps mitigate ego depletion for a short while, but not for long. Participants that were led to believe that they will not get fatigued performed well on a second task but were fully depleted on a third task.[16]

Here is another example of both belief in the form of 'self image' or the self as 'worthy/worthless' - which is always tied to social connection.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22542651

Heart rate variability moderates the association between attachment avoidance and self-concept reorganization following marital separation.

Abstract
Despite substantial evidence indicating that relationships shape people's self-concept, relatively little is known about how people reorganize their sense of self when relationships end and whether this varies as a function of people's beliefs about relationships. In this report, we examine the prospective association between self-report adult attachment style and self-concept recovery among 89 adults following a recent marital separation. People high in attachment avoidance are characterized by the tendency to deactivate (i.e., suppress) painful attachment-related thoughts and feelings, and, following Fagundes, Diamond, and Allen (2012), we hypothesized that highly avoidant people would show better or worse self-concept outcomes depending on their ability to successfully regulate their emotional experience during a divorce-related mental recall task. We operationalized self-regulation using respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and found that highly avoidant people who showed RSA increases {increased HRV} across our divorce-related mental activation task (DMAT) evidenced improvements in their self-concept over three months. In contrast, highly avoidant adults who showed RSA decreases {low HRV} during the DMAT showed no improvement (or a worsening) in their self-concept disruptions over the subsequent three months. These results suggest that RSA, an index of heart rate variability, may provide a window into self-regulation that has the potential to shed new light on why some people cope well or poorly following the loss of a relationship. Discussion centers on the potential mechanisms of action that explain why some people are able to successfully deactivate attachment-related thoughts and feelings whereas other people are not.

Age[edit]
The majority of ego depletion studies have been carried out on university students, which raises concerns about how generalizable the results really are. Younger people may simply be more susceptible to the effects of ego depletion, given that the areas of the brain involved in self-control continue to develop until the mid 20s. For example, a recent study found that people over the age of 40 did not become ego depleted following a typical depletion manipulation, whereas younger, university students did.[17]

Real-life implications[edit]
In a state of ego depletion, an individual’s impaired ability to self-regulate can be implicated in a wide range of undesirable and maladaptive behaviors, such as acts of aggression. Knowledge and strategies to counteract ego depletion would therefore, be highly beneficial in various real-life situations.[citation needed]

Dieting[edit]
An experiment performed by Kathleen Vohs and Todd Heatherton demonstrated how ego depletion is particularly relevant when considering chronic dieters compared to non-dieters.[18] Chronic dieters constantly work at resisting their cravings and limiting their food intake. Vohs and Heatherton showed that the task of regulating food intake could be undermined in the face of tempting snacks, especially when the individual was experiencing a state of ego depletion. Both dieters and non-dieters attempted to suppress their emotional responses while watching a movie. Afterwards, participants were required to consume ice cream in order to engage in a taste-test. The major finding was that dieters who suppressed their emotional responses to the movie experienced more ego depletion than those who were not required to suppress their emotions. Additionally, those individuals subsequently ate much more ice cream in the taste-testing task. Non-dieters did not show the same self-regulatory failures as dieters in these tasks. Therefore, it seems that the act of dieting itself is a form of resource expenditure. Dieters spend so much energy trying to limit their food intake, but these efforts are likely to be undermined when faced with overwhelming temptation.

Athletic performance[edit]
Research has found that competitive athletes’ mental determination can be hindered after completing a difficult cognitive task more than after completing an easy cognitive task.[19] This indicates that the hindering effects of ego depletion can be applied not only to subsequent performance on cognitive tasks, but on physical tasks, as well.

Consumer behavior[edit]
In the world of consumerism, individuals are faced with decisions and choices that require the use of valuable energy resources in order to make informed purchases while resisting temptation of impulsive or unnecessary purchases. Consumers are constantly bombarded with a broad range of options. In order to make the best choice, one must compare the many different aspects of various products. The complexity of consumer decisions in itself can result in ego depletion.[20] This, in turn, could impact any subsequent decisions consumers must make. When consumers are depleted, they are more likely to become passive, and make more impulsive decisions that may not fall in line with their true values.

Theoretical explanations[edit]
Conservation hypothesis[edit]
The conservation hypothesis is a partial explanation of ego depletion. It suggests that there are two sorts of depletion:

When one is completely depleted and unable to self-control.
When one is not fully depleted, but partly. Still, one reduces his self-control efforts to avoid complete exhaustion.[21]
According to this view, when people feel depleted, there might still exist a reserve store of energy to be used in extreme, high priority situations that could be encountered in the future. This can be adaptive to the extent that expending any more resources at a given time might render an individual fully depleted of their resources in an unexpected situation requiring self-regulation or other self-monitoring behaviours. The existence of a spare reservoir of mental energy ultimately explains why various motivators can buffer the effects of mild or moderate ego depletion. In a state of low resources, an individual lacks motivation to exert any more energy, but if motivation is presented, there are still extra resources that can be used up. Thus, ego depletion could be conceptualized as a psychological constraint necessary to safeguard precious resources that might be needed in emergency situations in the future. Under mild depletion, people still have a small amount of energy left in their "tank", which they do not have access to under normal circumstances.[21]

Questions and alternative explanations[edit]
Although self-control has traditionally been thought of as a limited resource that can be depleted, some researchers disagree with this model[2]. While multiple studies prove the ego depletion effect, there is currently no direct measure of ego depletion, and studies mainly observe it by measuring how long people persist at a second task after performing a self-control task (the depleting task).[1] The theory of ego depletion relies on the inner workings of an individual's volition, which can only be indirectly tested; therefore, only inferences can be made.[original research?] Another challenge facing research on ego depletion is the influence of the overall mental conditions of individuals being studied. There is speculation that results may be disrupted in individuals who report experiencing depression and already possess high levels of ego depletion prior to the study.[original research?]

Many ego depletion studies, however, have shown that mood is not relevant to the results. In fact, many of the earlier experiments have tested for the effects of mood and saw no effect of mood whatsoever. Furthermore, the study and measurement of ego depletion may be affected by the confounding effect of cognitive dissonance. Researchers have questioned whether subjects are truly experiencing ego depletion, or whether the individuals are merely experiencing cognitive dissonance in the psychological tasks.[1]

Process model[edit]
In contrast to the original most known model of self-control, Michael Inzlicht and Brandon J. Schmeichel propose an alternative model of depletion, which they refer to as the process model.[9] This process model holds that initial exertions of willpower lead an individual's motivation to shift away from control, and towards gratification. As a part of this process, one's attention shifts away from cues that signal the need for control, and towards cues that signal indulgence. Inzlicht and Schmeichel argue that the process model provides a starting point for understanding self-control and that more research examining these cognitive, motivational, and affective influences on self-control is needed.

A lot of the models of 'ego depletion' tested sugar (to see if it was literally fuel for the brain) to see if that influenced depletion.

Physiological correlates[edit]
The role of glucose as a specific form of energy needed for self-control has been explored. Glucose, a sugar found in many foods, is a vital fuel for the body and the brain. Multiple experiments have connected self-control depletion to reduced blood glucose, and that self-control performance could be replenished by consuming glucose (e.g., lemonade).[3] However, some (but not all) of the findings were questioned.[4] Several recent experiments have found that resource depletion effects can be reversed by simply tasting (but not swallowing or consuming) sweet beverages,[5][6][7] which can have rewarding properties.[8] Others have suggested that the taste of sugar (but not artificial sweetener) has psycho-physiological signaling effects

Given the perceived fatigue effects, it may be possible that this is working on the same system - belief. Taking into account the idea that ego depletion may actually be the result of reality not matching your view of it:

The underlying neural processes associated with self-control failure have been recently examined using neurophysiological techniques. According to cognitive and neuroscientific models of mental control, a "conflict-monitoring/error-detection system" identifies discrepancies between intended goals and actual behaviors.[9] Error-related negativity (ERN) signals are a waveform of event-related potentials, which appear to be generated in the anterior cingulate cortex when individuals commit errors in various psychological tasks.[10] Using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, Inzlicht and Gutsell found that individuals who had undergone an emotion-suppression task displayed weaker ERN signals compared to individuals who had not undergone emotion-suppression tasks.[9] These findings demonstrate preliminary evidence that depletion experienced after exerting self-control, can weaken neural mechanisms responsible for conflict monitoring

Emotional regulation is tied to HRV too:
http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=honors_theses

Matter over Mind: Comparing Emotion Regulation Techniques with Ego Depletion
[..]
Butler (2011) provides a model of self-regulation that is directly connected to the
autonomic nervous system. The Neurovisceral Integration Model (NIM) supports a global selfregulatory
system encompassing emotion, cognition, and physiology. Butler reviews literature
that has found a relationship between high heart rate variability and parasympathetic activation.
Hence, she argues that if one trusts the NIM model, then high heart rate variability should be
associated with more effective self-regulation, and that low heart rate variability (indicating
sympathetic activation) is associated with poorer self-regulation.

http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00278/full

From the heart to the mind: cardiac vagal tone modulates top-down and bottom-up visual perception and attention to emotional stimuli
The neurovisceral integration model (Thayer and Lane, 2000) posits that cardiac vagal tone, indexed by heart rate variability (HRV), can indicate the functional integrity of the neural networks implicated in emotion–cognition interactions. Our recent findings begin to disentangle how HRV is associated with both top-down and bottom-up cognitive processing of emotional stimuli. Higher resting HRV is associated with more adaptive and functional top-down and bottom-up cognitive modulation of emotional stimuli, which may facilitate effective emotion regulation. Conversely, lower resting HRV is associated with hyper-vigilant and maladaptive cognitive responses to emotional stimuli, which may impede emotion regulation. In the present paper, we recapitulate the neurovisceral integration model and review recent findings that shed light on the relationship between HRV and top-down and bottom-up visual perception and attention to emotional stimuli, which may play an important role in emotion regulation. Further implications of HRV on individual well-being and mental health are discussed.
[..]
These findings demonstrate that people with higher resting HRV are capable of controlling inhibitory attention, highly instrumental in top-down emotional attention, whereas people with low resting HRV are less capable of controlling it.
[..]
Results of extensive research have indicated that low resting HRV is typically observed in people with various psychopathologies, including generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia (Thayer et al., 1996; Rottenberg et al., 2002; Friedman, 2007; Bär et al., 2008, 2009; Castro et al., 2008; Pittig et al., 2013). Furthermore, healthy individuals with lower resting HRV demonstrate heightened activity in the middle occipital gyrus and the cuneus during visual perception of emotional and neutral stimuli, which are typically observed in people with high risk of psychosis (Park et al., 2012a). Another line of research has indicated that cognitive processing of emotional stimuli may significantly contribute to the etiology and maintenance of various psychopathologies, such as anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia (Beauchaine et al., 2007). For example, it has been well established that people with high anxiety are characterized by attentional bias favoring threatening stimuli (Lee and Park, 2011). Schizophrenic patients also exhibit impaired visual perception of emotional facial expressions (see Edwards et al., 2002, for a review). However, there has been limited evidence linking HRV to bottom-up and top-down cognitive processing of emotional stimuli. Our research systematically examine the relationship between HRV and top-down and bottom-up visual perception and emotion attention and provide evidence that lower resting HRV is associated with hyper-vigilant and maladaptive bottom-up and impaired top-down cognitive response to emotional stimuli. These studies raise the possibility that lower resting HRV may be a predisposing factor that increases the susceptibility of developing emotional and psychiatric problems (Park et al., 2012a).

Furthermore, several studies provided evidence that resting HRV is associated with the ability to control autonomic responses (Butler et al., 2006; Segerstrom and Nes, 2007; Gaebler et al., 2013; Park et al., 2014). People with lower resting HRV showed an autonomic stress response, phasic HRV suppression, to fearful stimuli, indicating that they interpret seemingly mild stimuli as a significant stressor (Gaebler et al., 2013; Park et al., 2014). This hyper-vigilant autonomic stress response will trigger a cascade of psychological and physiological defensive responses, which eventually puts wear and tear on a host of physiological systems (Park et al., 2014). Indeed, lower resting HRV has been frequently observed in people suffering from various health problems, such as hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, arthritis, and some cancers (Thayer et al., 1996; Friedman and Thayer, 1998; Park et al., 2014). Therefore, the failure in effective cognitive processing of emotion stimuli may impact not only mental and psychology well-being but also physical health.

Along the lines of interpreting minor stress as major:
http://uknowledge.uky.edu/psychology_etds/27/

RELATIONSHIPS AMONG PAIN THRESHOLD, SELF-REGULATION, EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING, AND AUTONOMIC ACTIVITY: A GENERAL INHIBITORY SYSTEM PERSPECTIVE

Abstract
Chronic pain patients have poorer pain inhibition, self-regulatory ability, executive functioning and autonomic inhibition than those without pain, supporting the view that suppressing pain is mentally taxing. In the current study, an alternate explanation was proposed; namely, that pain inhibition, self-regulation, executive functions, and heart rate variability (HRV) are all controlled by the same general inhibitory system. To test this hypothesis, participants came into the laboratory for three sessions. At the first session, individual differences in pain thresholds, self-regulatory strength, executive functioning, and HRV were measured. At the second and third sessions, self-regulatory persistence and within-session changes in pain thresholds were measured under conditions of high and low self-regulatory fatigue. Results revealed that those low in inhibitory strength, operationalized as the aggregate of pain inhibition, self-regulation, executive functioning, and HRV, became more sensitive to pain under conditions of self-regulatory fatigue, whereas no significant changes in pain threshold were found for those high in inhibitory strength. Additional analyses revealed that high baseline pain threshold marginally protected against the effects of self-regulatory fatigue. The findings provide some support for a general inhibitory system and suggest that physiological inhibition of pain and autonomic activity may be influenced by phasic self-regulatory fatigue.

http://robjellis.net/papers/Koenig_et_al_2013_EJP.pdf

Heart rate variability and experimentally induced pain in healthy adults: A systematic review
[..]
Findings from these studies may have important clinical implications as a large variety of health conditions are associated with changes in ANS function that can be indexed by HRV (Rajendra Acharya et al., 2006). Addressing the field of pain, reduced HRV is reported in patients with complex regional pain syndrome (Terkelsen et al., 2012), fibromyalgia patients (Mork et al., 2013), patients with chronic neck pain (Kang et al., 2012), irritable bowel syndrome (Mazurak et al., 2012) or headache (Micieli et al., 1993; Tubani et al., 2003). Furthermore, lower HRV is associated with extended pain-related sick leave in employees (Kristiansen et al., 2011). Thus, HRV is of interest as a potential biomarker for specific painrelated diseases (Lerma et al., 2011) and a potential outcome measure for the relief of pain due to therapeutic interventions (Storella et al., 1999; Zhang et al., 2006; Toro-Velasco et al., 2009). Evidence on the relation of HRV and experimentally induced pain in healthy subjects may help gain further insights on changes in autonomic function in patients with pathological pain states.

Of course, that may just mean the HRV was low because the patients where depressed from there conditions (or before hand) - all the above suggests that low HRV means you are More effected by stress/pain/emotions/social interactions, causing 'ego depletion' and lowering your HRV. Catch 22.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-neuroscience-of-heart/

Psychology beyond the Brain
[..]Psychology’s recognition of the body’s influence on the mind coincides with a recent focus on the role of the heart in our social psychology. It turns out that the heart is not only critical for survival, but also for how people related to one another. In particular, heart rate variability (HRV), variation in the heart’s beat-to-beat interval, plays a key role in social behaviors ranging from decision-making, regulating one’s emotions, coping with stress, and even academic engagement. Decreased HRV appears to be related to depression and autism and may be linked to thinking about information deliberately. Increased HRV, on the other hand, is associated with greater social skills such as recognizing other people’s emotions and helps people cope with socially stressful situations, such as thinking about giving a public speech or being evaluated by someone of another race. This diverse array of findings reflects a burgeoning interest across clinical psychology, neuroscience, social psychology, and developmental psychology in studying the role of the heart in social life.

A key moment for the field came in 1995, when Stephen Porges, currently a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, put forth Polyvagal Theory, a theory that emphasized the role of the heart in social behavior. The theory states that the vagus nerve, a nerve likely found only in mammals, provides input to the heart to guide behavior as complex as forming relationships with other people as well as disengaging from others. A distinguishing feature of Polyvagal theory is that it places importance not on heart rate per se, but rather on the variability of the heart rate, previously thought to be an uninteresting variable or mere noise.

Since 1995, a broad spectrum of research emerged in support of Polyvagal theory and has demonstrated the importance of the heart in social functioning. In 2001, Porges and his colleagues monitored infants when they engaged in a social interaction with the experimenter (cooing, talking, and smiling at them) and when they encountered the experimenter simply making a still face—a frozen expression—toward them. Infants’ HRV not only increased during the social interaction, but also increases in HRV predicted positive engagement (greater attention and active participation by the infants) during this interaction. In adults as well, HRV appears to be associated with success in regulating one’s emotions during social interaction, extraversion, and general positive mood. {It is likely that your own upbringing (social interactions) as well as genetic traits effect your HRV. This level can be changed however!}

A number of recent findings converge on the role of heart rate variability in adaptive social functioning as well. One study by Bethany Kok and Barbara Frederickson, psychologists at the University of North Carolina, asked 52 adults to report how often they experienced positive emotions like happiness, awe, and gratitude and how socially connected they felt in their social interactions every day for a period of nine weeks. The researchers also measured the HRV of each individual at the beginning and end of the study by measuring heart rate during a two-minute session of normal breathing. HRV at the beginning of the study predicted how quickly people developed positive feelings and experiences of social connectedness throughout the nine-week period. In addition, experiences of social connectedness predicted increases in HRV at the end of the study, demonstrating a reciprocal relationship between heart rate and having satisfying social experiences.

Although high heart rate variability seems to have largely positive effects on people’s emotional state and their ability to adapt to their social environment, the story may soon become more complicated. For example, in unpublished research, Katrina Koslov and Wendy Berry Mendes at Harvard University have recently found that people’s capacity to alter—and in a sense regulate—HRV predicts their social skills. In three studies, Koslov and Mendes measured this capacity to alter HRV during a task involving tracking the location of shapes on a computer screen (completely unrelated to anything social), and demonstrated that people’s capacity to alter HRV during this task subsequently predicted both their ability to judge others’ emotions accurately and their sensitivity to social feedback (how much they responded positively to positive feedback and negatively to negative feedback). These findings suggest that although high HRV at rest may be adaptive for social engagement, the capacity to modulate HRV also promotes social sensitivity.

Writers from Ovid to Stevie Wonder have used the heart as a convenient metaphor to convey emotional responses toward others. Emerging research suggests, however, that this metaphor is an oversimplification. The heart has complex interactions with how we treat and evaluate others, how we cope with social stress, and how we manage our emotions, and research has only begun to explore the relationship between cardiovascular processes and social life. Although philosopher Blaise Pascal noted, “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know,” it is clear that psychological research is beginning to illuminate this mystery.

Two things I have noted about many different psychological therapies is they tend to have two things in common for people who get better:
1) The person wants to change (which I think stems from the belief they CAN change vs feeling so helpless/hopeless they believe they CAN'T change - it is a belief that makes a difference).
2) Social connection - they all had the memory of at least one person in their life who was kind/supportive whilst growing up. This may tigh back to the first point - how can you change your beliefs if you never connect? And from the look of how HRV can form a catch 22, this may be the make or break position.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150120121125.htm

Poor social integration = poor health

There are many benefits to being supported by a strong social network. But can having more friends actually make you healthier? New research from Concordia shows that social relationships affect not only our mental but also our physical wellbeing.
In a recent study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine, Jean-Philippe Gouin, a Concordia psychology professor, tracked a group of international students who experienced major social change following a move to Montreal. The results showed that those who managed to build a better support network were healthier overall. The proof is in their heart rates.
Over a five-month period, participants responded to questionnaires that measured their social integration, as well as how lonely they felt. Gouin and his Concordia co-authors, Stephanie Fitzpatrick and Biru Zhou, also monitored participants' heart rates to detect changes in what's known as high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV).
Why the interest in heart rate fluctuations? Because it's a marker of how well your parasympathetic nervous system is functioning. "Other research has shown that individuals with a lower heart rate variability are at increased risk for the development of poor health, including greater risk for cardiac diseases. Therefore, decreases in heart rate variability are bad for you," Gouin says.
The study showed that immigrants who were able to form friendships and get involved in new social networks during their first five months in Canada had increases in heart rate variability, while those who remained socially isolated over time showed a decrease.
"In the weeks and months that follow a major move, people often find it hard to make new friends and establish a solid social network," says Gouin, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Chronic Stress and Health. "This study shows that such prolonged social isolation can have a negative effect on physical health by impacting our parasympathetic functioning. That applies not just to international students but to anyone moving to a new country or city or anyone experiencing major social changes."
What can new immigrants do to keep their HF-HRV functioning at high levels so that their autonomic nervous systems keep up the good work? "The message is clear: Reach out to other people. The more quickly you manage to integrate socially in your new home, the healthier you'll be. It's easier said than done, but it's worth it," Gouin says.

Perhaps this is why some people seek out social situations even if they know they are unhealthy? It 'recharges there will power' and they probably feel energized by it. Conversely when their will power is low, they will search out Any social interaction.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3429409/

Oxytocin Increases Heart Rate Variability in Humans at Rest: Implications for Social Approach-Related Motivation and Capacity for Social Engagement
[..]
Results

As hypothesised, OT increased HRV and these effects were largest using the detrended fluctuation scaling exponent, a non-linear measure. These changes were observed in the absence of any change in state mood, as measured by the profile of mood states. Importantly, participants were unable to correctly guess which treatment they had been assigned at either of the two assessments.

Conclusions

Together with the broader literature on OT and HRV, findings suggest that acute administration of OT may facilitate a fundamental psychophysiological feature of social behaviour, increasing capacity for social engagement. Findings also suggest that HRV changes may provide a novel biomarker of response to OT nasal spray that can be incorporated into research on response to treatment.

As some people have had problems with sex addiction (sex releasing oxytocin - thus lowering HRV) this may be another thing to consider. Again it would be something that shows up when 'will power is low' (HRV is low).

On addiction and HRV
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3833579/

Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback in Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

Strategies are needed to improve adolescent substance abuse treatment outcomes. For example, during outpatient substance abuse treatment, up to 80% of adolescents continue to use.1,2 Following residential substance abuse treatment, 88% of adolescents relapse within 6 months.3

Psychosocial stress plays an important role in the maintenance of substance use and also in relapse. A study of 2031 16- to 24-year-olds with past-month marijuana use showed that 56% used marijuana in the past month to cope with life stress.4 Furthermore, in a study of 81 adolescents (aged 13–18 years) followed for 6 months after treatment, 67% of those who relapsed reported a stressful event just prior to relapse.3 Therefore, treatment outcomes might be improved by interventions that help teens cope with stress.

Heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback may be a good intervention for this population because it reduces stress in adolescents who are not receiving treatment for substance abuse.5,6 Furthermore, HRV patterns of low amplitude and coherence are found in adults with substance use disorders during craving states and in youth with disorders (eg, oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder) that frequently lead to substance use.7,8 HRV biofeedback also reduces mean salivary cortisol levels, and corticotropin-releasing factor inhibitors have been shown to reduce stress-related relapse in animal models.9,10 Despite these findings, there are no controlled studies examining the role of HRV biofeedback to help prevent relapse following substance abuse treatment.

To address this research gap, this case letter evaluates the preliminary feasibility of HRV biofeedback to augment adolescent substance abuse treatment.

The patient is a 17-year-old male who presented to substance treatment for cannabis use. He started smoking marijuana at age 12 and started smoking daily at age 14. Starting at age 14, he had multiple convictions including possession of illicit substances, motor vehicle theft, and reckless driving. Despite being in a juvenile detention center, on ankle monitoring, and on probation for 3 years, he felt “hopeless” and “overwhelmed” about not being able to stop smoking marijuana for more than 4 weeks. Therefore, he voluntarily sought substance treatment. He identified stress and anger as primary triggers for marijuana use.

On admission, the patient met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, criteria for cannabis dependence and conduct disorder by clinical interview. He reported daily marijuana use until 4 weeks before baseline. His Perceived Stress Score was 18, with mean scores for males his age being 14.7 (SD = 7.2)11 The baseline HRV time series plot, shown in Figure 1, showed irregular, jagged waveforms.5 The baseline power series plot showed signals of various frequency spectra. Both findings suggesting concurrent sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system input.5 {that is both the 'relax' and 'fight/flight' where active at the same time! as he was around people, can we conclude that minor social stress was being interpreted as 'major' as mentioned earlier?}

Over 20 weeks, the patient received nine sessions of individual, manual-standardized cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and two family sessions. He also received six 10-minute sessions of HRV biofeedback following his 50-minute CBT sessions. The biofeedback sessions were integrated with the themes of his CBT sessions, which included modules such as coping with cravings, communication skills, anger management, and problem solving. The biofeedback sessions used emWave Desktop Stress Relief (HeartMath, LLC, Boulder Creek, California) and were conducted by a certified HeartMath practitioner.

The patient reported no substance use during treatment and provided a negative urine drug screen at each treatment visit. The HRV tracings, shown in Figure 2, showed improved amplitude and coherence, suggestive of increased parasympathetic nervous system input.5 At the end of treatment, the patient's Perceived Stress Scale was 5, which was consistent with the patient reporting feeling “calmer” and “more confident.” The patient reported using the biofeedback techniques regularly during stressful moments and prior to athletic events. His grade point average increased from a 1.6 to a 3.1 on a 4-point scale. In a follow-up telephone call 1 year after treatment, the patient reported continued sobriety and that he uses the biofeedback techniques daily. He is currently enrolled in a 4-year university.

So can we conclude that (perceived) social pain due to low HRV (among other things) and/or medical conditions that lead to pain sensitization (BPD being an example of 'emotional sensitization') leads to 'loss of will power'/addiction? The perception of social pain/stress being based on personal history?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think
[..]
But in the 1970s, a Professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was - at the same time as the Rat Park experiment - a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers , and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified: they believed a huge number of addicts were about the head home when the war ended.

But in fact, some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers - according to the same study - simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days - if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know - if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is - again - striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal - but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)
[..]

So if our beliefs hold that we are 'unworthy' of social connection - that belief is the cage that hold our HRV low and thus we have no will power. Living in today's society will also produce similar results. Acknowledging our feelings (and sharing them with others such as the people here, a professional councillor or even just journaling them) means we are not using our will power to fight them off!

The following is selling a product(s), but I still think it has some valid points that I will highlight (couldn't find a better alternative to illustrate this point).
_https://www.bulletproofexec.com/how-to-biohack-your-courage-using-the-wizard-of-oz-and-heart-rate-variability/

How to Biohack Your Courage Using the Wizard of Oz (and Heart Rate Variability)

Lots of us are in the habit of thinking of the body as a simplistic machine that can be separated into separate, independent parts. It’s a useful way of thinking about the body. Your brain does your thinking, your liver is a filter, your heart is a pump, and it works to understand the system of your body at a high level. The problem is that there are much more complex interactions between our hearts, brains, and bodies, and no system in the body is truly independent from the other systems. Figuring out how to work across these systems is the key to owning your courage.
We also tend to think of emotions and intelligence as two separate entities, which is not entirely true. Your emotions are way faster than your intelligence, but that speed comes at a cost – your emotions happen whether or not it’s intelligent or logical that they do, and they happen before you have a chance to think about them. They just show up, but because they happen first, they also influence your cognition.
Some aspiring biohackers make the mistake of focusing on just their brain function, or just on managing stress. The truth is that doing either one has secondary benefits on the other, and separating them out makes them easier to think about, but it’s inaccurate.
Let’s say you’ve upgraded your IQ and intelligence with the techniques here on the blog. Let’s say you’ve also worked to manage your stress levels by practicing meditation and other relaxation techniques.
But have you connected these things? You’ve got the heart the tin man wanted, the brain the straw man wanted, but do you have the courage the lion wanted?
If you’re like most people, the answer is no, but it’s not for lack of trying.

How to Hack the Courage of a Lion

To build courage, you face your fears. This doesn’t have to be a dramatic show of events. If you’re afraid of heights, skydiving right away might be overkill. The best place to start building courage is with little things. Walk up to someone on the street and say hello while making eye contact. Ask for her/his number.
The problem with this gradual process is that most of us don’t understand what fear really is, so we go about teaching ourselves to “not be afraid.” When you do this, your core assumption is that your fear is rational and will listen to your rational thoughts. Fear, being survival and brain-stem based, doesn’t listen to rational thoughts because rational thoughts are too slow.
Think about it. If it was your sole job in life to spot a tiger about to pounce, you wouldn’t spend a lot of time listening to a slow-talking voice yammering about things like logic that aren’t dangerous. That’s why your fear-brain will gladly ignore you as you convince yourself that you’re not afraid of something because your rational brain thinks there’s no reason to be.
So now you’re screwed. You’ve taught yourself that you’re not afraid because there’s no reason you should be, you’ve disconnected your rational brain from your biology-driven fear response, the same one we share with all creatures that have a spinal cord. Your fear response is there for a reason – to keep your body from getting eaten, burned, or starving to death, and it will be there as long as you are alive.
The trick to hacking your courage is to know how to deal with that single fact.
By teaching yourself to ignore your fear when there’s no reason to be afraid, what you achieve is not courage. It’s ignorance. But it’s useful ignorance – it lets you temporarily overpower your fear response using sheer will. Since you learned to ignore the feeling of fear, you won’t even feel it when you’re using sheer will to overcome that feeling and act anyway.
Using sheer will to overcome irrational fear is a biologically expensive act, and all that wasted energy keeps you from being Bulletproof. When you run out of energy to power your sheer will holding the invisible fear at bay, the fear response from your reptile brain will absolutely interfere with your comprehension, with your focus, and with the way you treat other people. In other words, you’ll act like an asshole. Totally not Bulletproof.
In order to conquer your fears and build the courage of a lion, you will face your fear. Not the things that you’re afraid of, but the source of the fear itself: your sympathetic nervous system.
Learning to deal with that part of your nervous system that creates fear used to take years of meditation. Now things are different – we have heart rate variability training.

How Heart Rate Variability Training Gives You the Courage of A Lion

When most people face one of their irrational fears, they go into an automatic stress response. Their heart rate quickens, they sweat a little which changes galvanic skin response, they get a lump in their throat as salivary glands shut down, and their heart rate variability (the rhythmic change in the space between each heart beat) decreases. Most people don’t notice any of this at a conscious level; it’s automatic and effortless. And it makes you weak.{Only if prolonged, in a moment of life and death it helps you survive}
Combat veterans know this well and account for it, as elegantly described in On Combat, The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, a book every aspiring biohacker should read. (That is an affiliate link; if you buy the book, Amazon may pay about 8 cents to support the blog; doesn’t go into my pocket…)
The strongest indicator that your fear-brain is getting in the way of your logical brain is your heart rate variability, or HRV. It turns out that when your brain stem is preparing your body to run away or fight (even without your conscious permission), the first thing it does is to change the rhythm of your heart beat so that your heart beat is very steady. When you’re unstressed, the space between each heart beat naturally varies quite a lot.
HRV training teaches you to control this stress response by using technology to tell you when your heart rate is highly variable, then teaching you to use your consciousness to control your animalistic fear response. There are two main ways this works. The first is by teaching you to recognize when your reptilian-derived brain stem is firing your sympathetic nervous system, priming your body to fight.
This directly gives you courage. Now, you can feel a fear when it happens, so you can acknowledge it and overcome it. It’s far less cowardly than simply pretending the fear doesn’t exist because there is no reason for it to exist. It also allows you to avoid feeling weak or unworthy when your reptile brain does something like make you lose control of your bowels in a fight, which happens to soldiers all the time.
The second way HRV gives you courage is that it teaches you to consciously turn off your sympathetic nervous system response to stress, the one you call fear. That’s amazing. First HRV teaches you how to know your reptilian brain is making you experience fear, then it teaches you how to make it stop. Then you can act with real courage, acknowledging and owning your fear rather than acting with a veneer of courage smeared on top of repressed fear.

If you don't know how (or are having trouble) accepting fear (or any other emotions) the following method is most useful: Is it possible to rewire your brain to change bad habits, thoughts & feelings?

In conclusion, if stress can help us grow and become stronger - how do we get to a point where we can utilize this? What are the psychological factors that turn stress/hardship/pain into our own prison? and what does this mean for our will power/addictions?

 

[RedFox]

Let's try to summarize some of the above:

1) HRV (Heart rate variability) is the change in heart rate (fast/slow) - and correlates to the fight/flight/vagal system.
2) It is a measure of health, will power, how accepted we feel about ourselves/others and capacity to handle stress!
3) Handling short periods of stress successfully (success being mostly subjective, and about our self belief) increases HRV, and thus will power/health/ability to handle more stress.
4) Chronic stress and/or negative beliefs about our abilities/social connection/self-worth negate this positive effect, no matter how much the positive part of the vagal system is stimulated. This results in/is a result of low HRV.
5) Low HRV is an indication of 'sensitisation' to stress (physical/emotional/mental). It is symptomatic of the 'fight/flight' system being active, which sensitises you to danger/pain and makes you 'hypervigilent'. This can lead to a catch-22 of not being able to get close to the things that would free you from this mode of operation. It can become so 'normal' that you don't even notice it.
6) Low HRV is also tied to addiction/automatic system 1 behaviour - as you are 'out of will power'.

How can you tell if this catch-22 is a problem for you? If you have been following the EE program (eating keto, sleeping in complete darkness etc) then your capacity to handle stress will have increased (you have increased your HRV)! You should then be able to apply the principle of getting strong through intermittent stress exposure.
Meditate to become a healthier, happier and more compassionate human being

So if you find yourself in that position where this hasn't happened (you are in catch-22 and your capacity to handle stress is still not increasing much, if at all), what can be done about it?

Firstly if this is too much to handle by yourself then seek out a professional counsellor.

On admission, the patient met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, criteria for cannabis dependence and conduct disorder by clinical interview. He reported daily marijuana use until 4 weeks before baseline. His Perceived Stress Score was 18, with mean scores for males his age being 14.7 (SD = 7.2)11 The baseline HRV time series plot, shown in Figure 1, showed irregular, jagged waveforms.5 The baseline power series plot showed signals of various frequency spectra. Both findings suggesting concurrent sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system input.5 {that is both the 'relax' and 'fight/flight' where active at the same time! as he was around people, can we conclude that minor social stress was being interpreted as 'major' as mentioned earlier?}

7) Beliefs (emotional memories) effect your HRV. If it was dangerous growing up to express emotions or have strong social connections this (or similar) implicit memories will be modulating your vagal tone and signalling 'danger' as you get close to the issues or start to relax.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_memory

Implicit memory is a type of memory in which previous experiences aid the performance of a task without conscious awareness of these previous experiences.[1] Evidence for implicit memory arises in priming, a process whereby subjects are measured by how they have improved their performance on tasks for which they have been subconsciously prepared.[2][3] Implicit memory also leads to the illusion-of-truth effect, which suggests that subjects are more likely to rate as true those statements that they have already heard, regardless of their veracity.[4] In daily life, people rely on implicit memory every day in the form of procedural memory, the type of memory that allows people to remember how to tie their shoes or ride a bicycle without consciously thinking about these activities. Research into implicit memory indicates that it operates through a different mental process from explicit memory.[1]

The best way to find you implicit memories are to find what causes you stress (things that have 'always' stressed you), and then to 'undo' those memories.
Part of undoing them is understanding their context (both what it means to be human, and your personal history) to help remove the belief that being at their mercy makes you 'broken'. If you where never taught these things, how could you have acted differently?
One thing to keep in mind is that social connection is not only about survival, but also about how we handle stress and pain (sharing/empathy).

Is it possible to rewire your brain to change bad habits, thoughts & feelings? (it is worth reading the entire article)

[..]What psychotherapy has added to the discoveries of the research lab is a range of experiential methods that make it possible for therapists to help clients move on from the past, allowing it to release its terrible grip on the present.
This type of swift, deep, enduring change - popularly known as the clinical breakthrough - has occurred in a wide range of relatively new "deep change" approaches, all of which have a strong experiential component: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Somatic Experiencing, Emotion-Focused Couples Therapy, Coherence Therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Hakomi, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, to name just a few. Of course, therapists have used all sorts of metaphors and theoretical concepts to describe breakthroughs since the emergence of our field. The difference today is that through understanding what's happening in the brain, we can unshroud the mystery of what's happening in the consulting room and make such breakthroughs happen far more regularly in our offices.

Locked and Unlocked Emotional Learnings

Therapeutic breakthroughs don't come easily for good reason. As relatively puny, hairless, vulnerable creatures in a world of stronger, more aggressive predators, we've evolved to favor false positives - reacting to learned signs of danger even in the absence of actual danger - over false negatives - ignoring potential threats. Since before our oldest hominid ancestors walked the earth, our nervous systems were biologically wired to keep fully alive the memory circuits of learned threat and danger for the duration of our lives, guaranteeing that we won't ignore cues to potentially perilous situations that could threaten our survival. From this perspective, the staying power of intense, distressing emotional arousal isn't a sign of dysfunction - quite the opposite. The fact that raw feelings of fear and rage can be retriggered by implicit cues learned in the past for alerting us to threats, even if the threat is no longer present, indicates that the emotional brain is functioning properly.

The hidden workings of emotional memory are greatly clarified by recognizing that memories of events are different from the learnings based on those events. Each of these memory types is stored in its own separate network in the brain. Consider perfectionism as an example of an emotional learning that therapists frequently encounter. Some clients describe clear memories of original experiences in which being imperfect on their part incurred intense shaming or rejection, but they have no awareness of the resulting implicit learning that has since ruled their responses in life - that it's urgent to be perfect to avoid such suffering. In contrast, other clients are aware of their learned expectation that imperfection is too dangerous to risk, but even when that expectation is triggered, they have no memory of the original life experiences in which that learning formed.

This example shows us that the original, concrete experiences and the learning formed from those experiences are the stuff of two different and separate kinds of memory. The first is episodic memory, or the memory of events that makes up our autobiographical narratives. The second is emotional implicit memory, or nonverbal memory of learned models of how the world functions. Obviously, the cause of the perfectionism is the existence of the emotional learning - the core belief that any imperfection brings rejection so I've got to be perfect - and not the episodic memory of original events. For this reason, emotional learnings are the target for the erasure process using new neuroscience. Memory of events is unaffected by that erasure. In other words, after erasure, clients remember what happened in their lives, but become free of their learning-driven emotional reactions.

Social rejection is tied to life and death survival and is registered in the brain as being as painful as a broken bone (especially if your HRV is low). Imagine being a child who's had a 'bone broken' that was never reset, which was ignored/covered up/normalised - because 'everyone has them'.
This is why social connection (or at least the understanding of it) is so important to healing. Beliefs around 'I'm worthless' stem from this pain - it is internalised social rejection, the emotional memory of the pain of it.

Nature, however, turns out to be more ingenious than that. The brain does come equipped with a key to those locked synapses - and we have the resilience to become radically free of our early emotional learnings. This key became evident in 1997, when several labs began publishing reports of a brain process that hadn't been recognized before. This process turns off a learned emotional response at its roots, not by merely suppressing it - as in a behavioral-extinction procedure - but by actually unlocking the neural connections holding it in place and then erasing it within the nervous system. Brain researchers named this process memory reconsolidation, and went on to demonstrate how it works in nematodes, snails, sea slugs, fish, crabs, honeybees, chicks, mice, rats, and humans. Remarkably, what the brain requires to unlock and erase a particular learning follows the same three-step process in all those species: reactivating the emotional response, unlocking the synapses maintaining it, and then creating new learning that unlearns, rewrites, and replaces the unlocked target learning.

What induces the brain to use its built-in key to unlock synapses in this process? The answer was discovered in 2004 by researchers who experimented with, of all things, a group of crabs, whose clearly visible fear responses to predators made them superbly suitable subjects. Héctor Maldonado's lab in Argentina placed crabs in a test area into which the moving image of a predator was introduced repeatedly. Needless to say, this seemingly near-death experience conditioned an extreme fear response in the crabs. Then one subgroup was placed in the test area one at a time, but the predator image wasn't introduced, and each crab in this group was simply returned to its safe cage. Crabs in another subgroup were placed back in the test area, but saw the predator coming as usual. Put another way, while one subgroup of crabs simply experienced the familiar "bad" event in the test area, the other group experienced a counterevent that created a sharp, powerful mismatch between learned expectations ("This is where the predator shows up!") and reality ("Hey, the predator didn't show up!").

Previous researchers thought reactivation of emotional learning alone unlocked a learned schema. But Maldonado's breakthrough with his crab test showed that an additional experience was required to loosen the hold of the fearful schema: a vivid contradiction of the reactivated learned pattern about how the world functions - what researchers call a mismatch experience or a prediction error experience. This contradictory experience, coming while the initial fearful learning was still intensely felt, quickly made the normally robust neural circuits of the target learning become labile and fragile. Then, through an ingenious procedure borrowed from earlier studies - use of a chemical agent that permanently shuts off labile, unlocked synapses but doesn't affect locked ones - Maldonado and colleagues proved that this prediction error was the key to the measurable erasure of the conditioned fear memory: only crabs that experienced the mismatch no longer responded fearfully in the test chamber.

As this experiment showed, emotional learning circuits unlock and become erasable only when a vivid new experience mismatches what a reactivated emotional learning leads an animal or person to expect. However, once a neural circuit has been unlocked, if nothing is done to erase and overwrite it during the next few hours, the synapses automatically relock - or reconsolidate - and the circuit restabilizes, preserving the original learning. The animal or person is then back at square one - still just as likely to be triggered by a stimulus reminiscent of the original terrifying event.
[..]

The Juxtaposition Experience

The moment of viscerally felt contradiction is what we call the juxtaposition experience in Coherence Therapy. Regina's case illustrates yet another way to reach that pivotal moment. A married mother of three and full-time professional, Regina had frequent bouts of panic during or right after social interactions, even with people she genuinely liked and knew well. She worried this meant she was "crazy."

Discovery work with her revealed that her anxiety began with a perception that someone had become even mildly displeased with her. That perception triggered an implicit expectation that a brutal rejection would follow.

Probing for attachment roots, her therapist asked gently, "When you were little, was it scary for you when someone became displeased?"

Regina nodded and became teary while describing her mother's sudden harshness and the way she'd yell at her, for example, for "making a mess" when she'd find Regina on the floor, drawing with her crayons on a piece of paper. Her mother often negatively compared her to the neighbor's daughter, verbally abused her by calling her "a piece of crap," and made overt threats of abandonment. In addition, these denigrations sometimes took place in front of visiting relatives, which was deeply humiliating and terrifying for Regina. In essence, she lived in perpetual fear of "making my mom start to hate me again."

When her therapist asked Regina to compare a recent instance of perceiving a negative social response from someone with an old memory of seeing Mom become displeased, she said the experiences felt the same. At this point, the therapist guided Regina to visualize her mother and become explicitly aware of the implicit terms of attachment she'd learned from her - the specific rules of the conditionality of love. The therapist went on to help Regina verbalize her emotional learning in the following way: "The slightest imperfection makes me completely disgusting and unlovable, so Mom wants to get rid of me and have some other girl instead, and I'm really scared that she might actually get rid of me. I'm acceptable and lovable only if I do everything perfectly. Everyone I ever know will reject me whenever some imperfection becomes visible, and I'm always dreading that and feel panic each time I think it's happening."

Regina had clearly generalized her mother's terms of attachment to all other people, which drove her anxiety and panic, so her specific expectation that "everyone I know will reject me whenever some imperfection becomes visible" became the target for dissolution through the erasure sequence of memory reconsolidation. The next step was to find a contradictory felt experience that was vivid and powerful enough to disconfirm and dissolve that target learning. To pursue that, the therapist asked, "Do you have a grandparent, an aunt, or uncle who's special to you?"

Regina nodded. Her uncle Theo was extremely special, she said. The therapist then guided her to picture him by saying, "Feel the warmth of your love for him and just notice where in your body you feel it." After a while, the therapist continued, "Go ahead and say to him what you believe from Mom. Try telling him, 'You love me only because I seem perfect, and you'd stop loving me if I let any of my imperfections show.'"

After internally saying this to him, Regina sat still for a while. "What's happening now?" the therapist asked softly.

With tears in her eyes, Regina reported, "The look on his face - he was so hurt by it."

"How do you understand his being so hurt by it?" the therapist asked.

Regina replied, "It's like it was a deep insult to his love for me, like I'm saying his love is lightweight and superficial, and he knows it isn't." Beginning to cry openly, she continued, "He knows he really loves me with all his heart, and imperfections wouldn't change that. So it's like I'm totally wasting his love if I think it's only because I seem perfect."

There it was - the contradictory living knowledge that others aren't necessarily the same as Mom. After about 30 seconds of silence in which Regina seemed to be absorbing this new knowing, the therapist mirrored it back to her by saying empathically, "He really loves you, whether or not your imperfections show up." With a nod, she confirmed the clear emotional truth of this recognition.

The ingredients needed for guiding the erasure sequence of memory reconsolidation were now in hand. The first step was to reactivate the target learning, so the therapist prompted Regina to picture her mother again and said, "What you know about her love is that it quickly disappears and turns into disgust and rejection when any imperfections show up, and you could easily expect that's how it would be with anyone, yes?"

Regina's earnest nodding indicated she was viscerally in touch with that emotional knowledge, so the therapist continued on to the second step: evoking the contradictory, mismatching knowledge. "On one side, there's Mom, and on the other side, there's Uncle Theo. His love is steady and reliable and unaffected by imperfections, and he just sees and feels how lovable you are and nothing changes that." Regina listened with eyes closed, seemingly absorbed in the developing juxtaposition experience. The target learning's synapses were unlocking.

Over the next few minutes, the therapist continued to call Regina's attention to that juxtaposition - the repetitions that serve as new learning that rewrites the target learning: "Both kinds of love feel so real, but they're so different. Can you feel both at once? Good. What's that like for you, seeing so clearly that both kinds of love exist, and that you're actually experiencing both?"

Guided in this way to apply mindful awareness to the juxtaposition experience, Regina sat silently, thinking and blinking, and then said, "I never thought of it like this before."

"Yes, it's very new," the therapist said, then guided another repetition by asking, "And as you look back and forth at your Mom and Uncle Theo, what happens?"

After another silence, Regina answered, "It's strange, but my Mom looks smaller." This was a first marker of a transformational shift in her mental model of her mother. She added, "And it's like what's wrong is over there in her, not here in me," which was another marker of change, indicating the beginning of dissolution.

Knowing that such fundamental shifts often have immediate, challenging ripple effects, the therapist now asked, "Is it entirely comfortable to know that the problem is in Mom and not in you? Or is there something uneasy about that?"

Regina replied, "It feels scary because then I can't have any control over it. If it's in me, I have a chance of controlling it. But if the reason she blows up at me is that she's messed up, then I can't possibly control it." Then she added, "But I'm feeling relief, too, because if she's the problem, then maybe there's nothing seriously wrong with me after all. And maybe I won't be rejected forever by anyone who gets to know me."

Although further work was needed to explore the "scary" loss of the illusion of control, this emergence from a lifetime of self-invalidation into a recognition of her own intactness and worth was a completely unprecedented shift for Regina. The main breakthrough had occurred.

Ready for Unlearning

The cases of Carol and Regina illustrate how different techniques can be used to facilitate the brain's core process of profound unlearning. That's why this process can be fulfilled within many different systems of experiential therapy. The particular usefulness of our Coherence Therapy approach is that its steps match those of the reconsolidation process: first, evoke into direct experience the emotional learnings underlying the client's unwanted patterns. Then find a vivid knowledge or experience that contradicts those learnings. Finally, combine those two into a juxtaposition experience and repeat it several times. [..]

With the above example above we can undo the 'social connection is dangerous' program which is driving down our HRV.

If you can't think of an example of 'someone who accepted you' as above, all you need do is imagine one, or perhaps even use the image in the article.
Brain's response to threat silenced when we are reminded of being loved and cared for

The study discovered that when individuals are briefly presented pictures of others receiving emotional support and affection, the brain's threat monitor, the amygdala, subsequently does not respond to images showing threatening facial expressions or words. This occurred even if the person was not paying attention to the content of the first pictures.
[..]
These new research findings may help to explain why, for example, successful recovery from psychological trauma is highly associated with levels of perceived social support individuals receive.

Hugging as form of social support protects people from getting sick

[..]
"We know that people experiencing ongoing conflicts with others are less able to fight off cold viruses.

We also know that people who report having social support are partly protected from the effects of stress on psychological states, such as depression and anxiety.

We tested whether perceptions of social support are equally effective in protecting us from stress-induced susceptibility to infection and also whether receiving hugs might partially account for those feelings of support and themselves protect a person against infection."
[..]

The counter 'image' you can hold in your head can be the example of the therapy session. If you are visual it can be the images above. If you are tactile it can be the feeling the hug in the image generates. If you are auditory it can be reading all of the above to yourself as if it where to another person you love dearly (a child perhaps).

Practising these things can help you get over any hurdles that hold you back from facing and thus growing strong from stress!

 

[RedFox]

I'm repeating a post from the other thread here as it dovtails nicely with the above. i.e. The above being the 'how' of facing stress, and the following being the 'why' (in the context of the Work and the state of the world) for facing stress.

I remember the C's saying that suffering activates DNA. Perhaps conscious suffering is a key to hormesis?

Perhaps not just conscious suffering but a strong will to survive coupled with the physical/psychological resources needed for survival as well.

Agreed, and thank you for bringing this up both of you as I think it's an important point. This is something I'm wrestling with and trying to understand.
I posted a bunch of connection of the psychological side of this here and it's connection to will power, social connection and EE/the vagal system. The C's did say that the Work can now be done through EE, so I'm starting to think this is (at least part of) the mechanism behind that.

In short - how do you get past yourself in order to help if you can't stand 'the heat of the stress' (lack of psychological/physical resources and understanding). How do you get past the automatic fear and overreactions to any kind of stress. How to begin even 'suffering consciously' if the stress blows you away.

Posting these threads was a heavy level of stress - just the same as replying to others and thinking 'you have nothing to offer'.

Some other examples of hormesis and getting stronger (conscious suffering?) that increase you capacity to face more of the same would be going gluten free (giving up addiction - the emotional component), paleo (more of the same), keto (fully moving away from the emotional connection food fills in for). Going keto in itself causes stress in the body during the transition and results in epigenetic changes and less systematic stress (needless resource depletion)/more energy (which can then be put into more of the same).
The emotional/psychological component and understanding may be as important as the understanding of it's benefits/how to proceed safely. If you attempt them without knowing why you should (having an aim that allows you to endure the suffering of transition - why should you consciously suffer?) and without understanding at least the basics of how it should be done (how to navigate the transition without undue stress - how to suffer safely? how to use the limited energy we have properly?) you will tend to fail.
Falling before getting over the 'smallest step'. osit

Maybe then one of the bigger parts of the psychological understanding is as follows - if social connection is so important to the human existence (the psychology goes into it's connection to heart rate variability which equates to will power): Study finds shared pain and suffering can increase cooperation and loyalty in groups

[..]Another theory, however, derives from something closer to the idea expressed by Emile Durkheim, writing in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Part 2, that pain, when it does not occur naturally, creates communal bonds in part because "suffering creates exceptional strength." The willingness and ability to endure pain for some greater cause tells you something about yourself and your fellow sufferers. A club is more valuable to you if you and everyone else endured feats of extreme physical endurance to enter it.
[..]
Pain, he's found, seems to play a central role in a group experience in a way that a pleasurable or neutral bonding experience simply doesn't. "It's a part of everyday life and we often seek it out in a number of ways," Bastian told me. "We tend to overvalue pleasure, but pain is a central part of what it means to be human and what makes us happy." [..]
At the end of the study, Bastian asked each individual how much pain she had experienced, and how she felt about her fellow study participants. The students who had endured the icy water and wall squats had not only felt more pain but had perceived a stronger bond with their fellow sufferers. They felt more solidarity with them and more loyalty to them - and they felt strongly that the experiment had created unity. Those who had participated in the non-painful version of the experiment felt no such thing.

Or (understanding hormesis) pain/stress with a goal in mind creates a huge shared social bond (connecting chakras?), giving more strength to endure/face stress. Perhaps this is what the C's meant when they said it would be 'ecstasy'?
Just getting stronger/learning to face stress needs to be taken in the context of the world as it is and what is going on - in order to face it and handle the stress/horror of it all and then get stronger at responding accordingly (speaking the truth). Incidentally this is how fear starts to evaporate - knowing that you can handle this sort of stress through practice, knowing that you are not alone in the fight and you are fighting for each other as much as the world/humanity (and by virtue yourself).

Bit of a rant there!

After facing the emotional pain/stress of our own past with the methods above, you can then apply them to facing bigger things about ourselves and the world. If you can increase your HRV (EE, engaging conciousely with stress)/erase the old emotional blocks you start to be able to see in less black and white terms, and can then see things in a broader context.
The intelligence of self observation and self-awareness

[..]However he changes his thinking or broadens his understanding, it happens because of self observation. The resulting self awareness lets him see his biases and work past them.

This isn't just about philosophical examples like those given, either. Simple pride about ones theory in biology, economics or family life can blind one to better ideas if it is not recognized as a limiting force. Being afraid to admit ignorance is another mind-killer. There all sorts of other things going on inside us too. One's own unconscious mind throws many obstacles in the path of clear thought, and self observation is what allows us to clear the way for better brainpower.

At the highest levels, better brainpower cannot be separated from higher self awareness. How do you become more self aware? Some people turn to meditation, and this is a good start. This helps one deal with the "monkey mind," which describes how the mind often jumps from thought to thought like a restless monkey in a tree, jumping around from branch to branch. The idea is to "tame" that busy barrage of thoughts.

Meditative practices help you observe things more clearly, concentrate better, and perhaps think more efficiently. Efficient doesn't necessarily mean effective, however. A perfectly tuned car can still take you to the wrong destination, right? Self awareness, then, starts with this meditative observation of the "chatter" in your mind, but for more powerful thinking you have to look deeper, to see the content of those thoughts and identify the patterns and biases working there, often unnoticed by you. [..]

You can embrace your biases and work with them, which allows you to see more of yourself and thus others and where they are coming from.
We are all confident idiots: 'The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance'

[..]An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that's filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous - especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq). As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." (Ironically, one thing many people "know" about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers - which just ain't so.)

Born Wrong

Some of our deepest intuitions about the world go all the way back to our cradles. Before their second birthday, babies know that two solid objects cannot co-exist in the same space. They know that objects continue to exist when out of sight, and fall if left unsupported. They know that people can get up and move around as autonomous beings, but that the computer sitting on the desk cannot. But not all of our earliest intuitions are so sound.

Very young children also carry misbeliefs that they will harbor, to some degree, for the rest of their lives. Their thinking, for example, is marked by a strong tendency to falsely ascribe intentions, functions, and purposes to organisms. In a child's mind, the most important biological aspect of a living thing is the role it plays in the realm of all life. Asked why tigers exist, children will emphasize that they were "made for being in a zoo." Asked why trees produce oxygen, children say they do so to allow animals to breathe. [..]

So in the context of 'why', does facing the stress of disillusionment make more sense?
It's not that people are broken/wrong, it's that they are mechanical and full of 'wrong knowledge'.

The Necessity of Disillusionment

The experience of disillusionment is one that is common to all. It is safe to say that at some time or another, every human being has had the experience of believing in something that turned out not to be true. The initial shock that comes when one's perception of the world is revealed to be at odds with the hard facts of reality can range anywhere from mild disappointment to a feeling of overwhelming psychological trauma.

Whatever the degree of deception, the realization that one has been believing in a lie is a painful experience, not only psychologically but physically as well. Like a punch to the stomach, it can feel like one's breath has been taken away. And because our beliefs about the world are interconnected with other beliefs fixed in our brains, the destruction of one belief can often lead to a cascade of collapse of many others.

When a person is confronted with facts that contradict currently held belief systems, they have one of two choices. The first choice is to go into denial mode by rejecting the facts as being untrue in order to prop up their chosen belief system and continue living as before. The second choice is to accept the new data and try and reconstruct a new internal paradigm or map of reality that accommodates the new information, which may mean putting into question all other beliefs associated with the old model.

The second choice is difficult and takes a great deal of strength in order to let go of one's preconceived ideas and accept the new and factual data. The first choice is easy because it requires no effort, pain, sadness, or reordering of one's life or values. It is also more comfortable, and because humans generally prefer comfort over pain, the first choice is often the default option.

The exact moment when a person becomes aware of facts that go against what is believed to be true, they experience what psychologists call cognitive dissonance; it is that tense, uncomfortable sensation that what one sees is so out of sync with what one already believes to be true, that the mind instantly rejects it, even when the facts are plain and indisputable.

It is in this moment of experiencing cognitive dissonance (you can recognize it by the tension and discomfort that triggers a "knee-jerk" reaction) that the crucial battle for truth over fiction takes place. If a person can muster the awareness and strength of will to not give in and take the comfortable route by immediately dismissing the facts outright, and hold the conflicting information in their minds while consciously experiencing the negative feelings associated with cognitive dissonance, the resulting liberation can be transformational. It has to be experienced to be believed!

The interesting thing about our tendency to stick with old belief systems, even when faced with hard evidence to the contrary, is the neuro-chemical reward factor. Scientific studies have shown that when experiencing cognitive dissonance (the tension and stress produced when presented with facts that undermine one's normal perception of reality), the decision (knee-jerk reaction) to ignore the factual data and sweep any contradictory evidence under the rug causes the brain to release certain chemicals, making us feel happy and safe again.

So, if believing in an illusion makes us feel safe, happy and comfortable, and any contradictory evidence causes us pain, disorientation and sadness, what possible motivation is there to consciously choose to go through the process of disillusionment?

The love and desire for Truth.

Humans by nature are a curious sort and, for the most part, want to know the truth about things. This love and desire for Truth is why we like puzzles and mystery novels: because of the satisfaction that comes with learning something new. The thrill of discovery, the joy in being amazed and the excitement of finding solutions to complex problems are all strong motivators for people to seek out new and unconventional modes of thinking.

It is only when this process of discovery conflicts with our already entrenched world view that the difficulties of accepting new information manifest. At the same time, no one likes being lied to; no one enjoys being taken advantage of or being played for a fool or turned into a chump. So when we discover that we have been deceived by people we trust, the sense of hurt and betrayal that accompanies this realization can be devastating. [..]

 

[luke wilson]

Any recommendations on a cheap yet effective HRV monitor?

 

[RedFox]

I haven't quite got that far yet - I've been looking into the cheapest possible (potentially DIY) options.

So far I'm doing it by feel/self observation. If you're HRV is low you'll experience muscle (for me specifically shoulder) tension, poor posture, black and white thinking, negative thinking/catastrophising/depression, thought about seeking social isolation/connection and automatic dissociative behaviour. You may even experience food craving (carbs), low blood pressure and fatigue.
Emotional/physical hypersensitivity or de-sensitivity is another clue.

Pipe breathing and acknowledging your body/emotional state with compassion/acceptance helps a lot. Just the awareness of it can shift things, along with knowing that you can do something about it.
Yoga, massage and other body therapies can help. Breathing into tension as described in yoga can also help (yo can even use it on emotions and thoughts). You can also use the method described above to 'dissolve' emotional memories that triggered in specific situations (that lower HRV/overwhelm you).
Positive social connection (helping others) will also increase HRV, as long as you don't then sink into anxiety over doing that (imagining or remembering being socially rejected) which will decrease HRV.
*edit* Remembering or imagining social connection (see above) will also increase HRV.

High HRV is associated with ease of movement (and even wanting to move/dance/sing) - just like a kid would spontaneously. Flexibility in thought and emotions. Lack of muscle tension. You can feel pain (physical/emotional) easily but 'bounce back' and it doesn't overwhelm you.

In essence this is biofeedback - it's just a bit trickier than having a box that tells you your current state though, as it requires enough self awareness (a high enough HRV) and practice to pay attention.
Stopping what you are doing, remembering to breathe and paying attention to your body provides enough of a shift in HRV to then engage all the above.

I'll let you know what I find :)

 

[Miss.K]

I do not agree with the statement that Mcgonigal makes at the beginning of the video regarding the study about "believing in stress being harmful" is a cause of death. The research basically asks people "did you have stress" as a measure of stress. People who die of major diseases are often not aware of the chronic stress they have been under. So the answer to the question "did you have stress" or "how much stress did you have" and using that as a baseline to promote the idea that stress is not harmful if you do not believe it is harmful is just bad science imo. Mcgonigal says that this study made her rethink her position on stress - so it seems that she started with a faulty premise.

I thought something similar.
If you ask someone who is experiencing a lot of stress if they think it is harmful for their health. The ones who already feel how the stress is killing them will say yes, and the ones who don't feel it is killing them will say no. And so it is faulty premise, as those 2 groups might have very different circumstances to begin with, apart from what they believe..maybe the first group are in more bad stressful situations, and maybe the second have a more fun stressful situations..or perhaps the first group has been stressed for longer so they are starting to feel it kills them, and the second will feel the same 10 years after if they keep being stressed...

Though IMO, how one perceives ones situation changes the bodys response, is not entirely wrong either....just don't think the study can be used to prove anything. It doesn't say anything either about what kind of support the people in each group has. Of cause it is easier to handle stress if you have loving people supporting you than if not. So perhaps it is not that they "think better", but just that they have "better people" around that makes them produce more oxitocin, Or perhaps they have someone that makes them dinner when they are not able to themselves, so they eat more regularly and less bad etc.

 

[Ryan]

Watched this video by McGonigal today and thought it was quite profound. Reminded me of these C's quotes:

A: [letters come very quickly] Balance! A portion of a day can be spent on reflection, but not too much. This is the Wetiko Virus: obsession with the self and subjective personal issues. The next time you feel yourself slipping into despair, just tell others how you are feeling and think of something you can do for another to prevent them from suffering the same feelings. [letters come more slowly now:] Thus you will witness the birth of true empathy.

A: More than that, it means that total engagement in energy exchange with the network. If a person benefits from the efforts of others and there is no return energy, there will be blocks of all sorts in their lives.
Q: (L) Okay, when you say, "There will be blocks of all sorts in their lives"... Blocks of what kind?
A: The blocks will reflect what it is that they are unable to give. If a person cannot be sincere, they will experience people in their personal lives who are not sincere with them. If a person devalues another's efforts, they will find their own efforts devalued. If you need to unblock a certain area of your life, make the effort to give what you want or need yourself.

A: Emotion that limits is an impediment to progress. Emotion is also necessary to make progress in 3rd density. It is natural. When you begin to separate limiting emotions based on assumptions from emotions that open one to unlimited possibilities, that means you are preparing for the next density.