Scott Carney: how to beat stress

Reprogramming our brains to brave fear can make us far more resilient than we imagine ourselves to be, according to a new book by Scott Carney.

To learn how to tame his own brain, the writer and adventurer put himself into a space of stress and discomfort he calls 'The Wedge'.

In The Wedge: Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human Resilience, Carney explains the extreme methods he used to give his life a reboot.

Carney's exploration of resilience started with the basic premise that humans develop and manifest greater abilities when under stress.

For many of us, comfortable modern-day life offers few opportunities to evolve in that way, he says.

“If you think about who we are as biological individuals, are you, when you think about yourself, at your best when you’re sitting on the couch?” 

“Is that how you define who you are, or is it when you take on challenges that actually push out your boundaries and give you more territory to act? One of the many messages of The Wedge is that we become more human, we get more abilities, when we are under stress and when we are pushing that envelope.

“We are far too comfortable. We are isolated in a range of environments where we feel okay and we’re not trying to become something better… When we put ourselves in stressful environments – and this can be something like ice water or intense heat, or a difficult emotional space – as you overcome those challenges you’re really reprogramming the way your body responses to stress.”

Understanding the physiology of our bodily responses and how these are bound up with emotion – including self-limiting negative emotion – is the key to relaxing in the face of challenges, Carney says.

The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which control our fight-flight responses to perceived danger, play a big role in our daily lives, sometimes working for us but many times working against our interests, he says.

“We have the fight-or-flight response, which are these really intense sensations that get triggered by the environment. If you see a lion, for example, and it’s charging at you and you’re not at the zoo, you’re going to dump lots of adrenalin and that’s to give you energy, you’re going to dump cortisol into your body to essentially dull your pain. But it’s not useful in every situation, right, when we’re doing our taxes, when we’re having a stressful conversation with our mother.

“Dropping the fight-or-flight adrenalin response is not always adaptive. What I’m asking people to do is pay attention to the things that they feel, because anything you feel... the reason that we evolved to have sensation is because it is always a choice for what we should do next.”

“Where we evolved, in the plains of Africa about 300,000 years ago, the stresses that we faced were real. So that lion chasing you, that constant weather change, those always had physiological responses…

“In the modern world, we don’t need those physiological responses, so that means when you dump adrenalin and cortisol and these stress hormones they’re not matching with the physiological output that we’re evolved to have and that creates all sorts of havoc in our bodies…

“One of the reasons you feel stressed out is you have all this energy in your body but you aren’t doing anything with it and I think what we need to do is realise we have these Palaeolithic, archaic bodies but we need to find ways of using them in the modern world because our technology evolved a lot faster than we need.”

"It’s about self-improvement, about making yourself, in general, more resilient to the things that life throws at you."

The Wedge, Carney says, is an intervention and a means to reset our system in a way that most benefits us, a means of gaining proper and proportionate adaptation to our environment.

“The easiest way to think about it is there is a stimulus coming from the outside world, whatever that may be, and you have some element of choice where you get to choose what that stimulus should be, rather than just reacting.”

In his previous book What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Stronger, Carney explored the benefits of training yourself to tolerate being in ice water for long periods of time.

Most people's instinctual reaction is to stiffen up in anticipation as we jump into cold water. But by retraining the brain to relax, and consciously acknowledging the cold isn’t a fatal threat, we can become accustomed to dealing with a stressful situation in a different way, he says.

The same method can be applied to other ‘stress’ scenarios to prevent the body’s parasympathetic nervous system getting activated and our bodies being flooded with ‘stress’ hormones, he says.

“You’re able to deal with stress in a totally different way.

“It’s about self-improvement, about making yourself, in general, more resilient to the things that life throws at you.”

Carney was a sceptic when he first learnt about the techniques Dutch extreme athlete Wim ‘The Iceman’ Hof uses to withstand freezing temperatures.

He was commissioned by Playboy magazine to write-up a piece debunking Hof's claims of being able to control things like his immune system.

Yet Carney discovered that when applying Hof's focus and breathing techniques he, too, was able to withstand ice water over extended periods.

The experience opened his mind to the body’s potential. Later, he was able to climb a mountain in Poland in -18C temperatures, semi-naked.

“It was shocking how quick Hof’s methods worked. It was life-changing for me, to go from this grounded, sceptical perspective to recognising there actually is the amazing of the body… there’s actually evolutionary principles that we’ve just forgotten.

“If you go back in time our ancestors were always dealing with a constantly-changing, constantly difficult environment and their bodies were responding to that and it made them pretty darn resilient.”

What we think are our limits contrasts sharply with what they truly are, Carney says.

He believes working with the body, trusting its abilities in the face of danger, and accepting the external sensations it's dealing with, is somehow tied to the resilience he was able to manifest on the frozen mountain but it's something he can’t conceptualise fully.

The brain’s limbic system – a set of structures in the brain that control emotion, memories and arousal – can be tapped into and reprogrammed, Carney says.

Our ‘limbic librarian’ helps us detect fear, control bodily functions and perceive sensory information by storing information sent from our nerves.

When this 'librarian' has no information on a new situation or sensation it defers to the para-limbic system, which simply binds it to the emotional state the subject is feeling at the time – then gives it back to the librarian.

The librarian then stores it away, so that when we experience this same situation again, our ‘neural grammar’ automatically associates it with that emotional state, which could be unmitigated fear.

This fear is then triggered when the experience or sensation is repeated, Carney says.

“It means you are always living in your emotional past – and that’s key."

“Every sensation you have, that combination of sensation and emotion, is a neural symbol and you can think of those like the bits and bytes of human cognition. Just like a computer, those ones and zeros don’t do much on their own but when you have billions of ones and zeros you have a computer programme and you can really get complex ideas. Everything we experience is the combination of sensation and emotion bonded together and that’s the root of human consciousness.

“The point of The Wedge is to essentially say ‘hey, let’s make different neural symbols’. So, when you feel something how do you want to feel that the next time you feel it? You can actually hack that process by forcing certain emotions and this is somewhat like the power of positive thinking…"

The Wedge method can be used to create a cognitive space where new emotional links to experiences and sensations can be intentionally created, Carney says.

“You can actually inscribe emotions and sensations together so that you become more resilient, so that when you feel something you don’t just automatically react negatively and you can overpower things you have already inscribed as negative in your system.”

With the pandemic creating more stress and uncertainty in people’s lives – and triggering fight-or-flight responses – Carney recommends people get outside and find physical things to do to release stress hormones. 

Having a communal focus is just as important, he says, hinting at a dialectical relationship between changing ourselves and societal change.

We are not isolated monads and pursuing activities for the common good is a worthy pursuit of resilience, Carney says.

“It’s also a time to get out there and say ‘look, my own emotions are important, but it’s important that society change, as well’. We don’t just want to navel-gaze, we want to go out and try to make a difference in the world, as well.”