Philip Pape: 0:01

If you're the type of person who feels like your stress response has been stuck in overdrive lately, where little things trigger massive anxiety or where one stressful event seems to cascade into an overwhelming spiral of negative thoughts and physical symptoms, this episode will change how you think about and manage stress. Today, we're talking about why stress can feel completely out of control even when, objectively, the stressors in your life haven't changed much at all. We'll look at stress through an engineer's lens to understand why your mind and body sometimes overreact to minor triggers. Whether you're dealing with daily anxiety, chronic stress that's affecting your training and nutrition, or just want to build more resilience, this episode will give you a powerful new framework to regain control. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.

Philip Pape: 1:02

I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're examining stress through an entirely new lens by applying a concept called the Nyquist Stability Criterion, to understand why stress can spiral out of control. And don't worry, I'm gonna explain what that is and you'll see why it makes a lot of sense. Now, I was recently working with a client, michelle. Special shout out to her for inspiring this episode. She is in our physique university and she made I'm going to call it an incredible self-discovery about how focusing on perceived stress versus actual stress helped her finally get a handle on chronic stress that had been plaguing her for years, and that got me thinking about stability in systems and how the same principles explain why our stress response can become unstable. Now what's fascinating is that two different people can experience exactly the same stressor, like a busy work schedule or a demanding training program, but then they react completely differently. One person maintains their cool, the other person gets really overwhelmed. Today, we're going to uncover why this happens and what you can do about it Before we get into it. Of course, if you are struggling with stress, if you want some personalized guidance on managing it while staying on track with your fitness goals, I'd love to help. Just book a free 15-minute rapid nutrition assessment call with me. It is not a sales pitch. It is a focused, fast session where we identify what's holding you back whether that is stress triggers or something related to your training nutrition and then create a simple three-step action plan to help you feel more in control. So click the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom and click the big button at the top for that rapid nutrition assessment.

Philip Pape: 2:41

All right, let's get into today's topic. What we're covering today is first, we're going to understand how stress works as a feedback loop and why your perception matters more than the actual stressors. A lot of this is in our minds, so if we can control that, or at least understand it, we can go much farther in coping with stress. Second, we're going to look at why some stress responses stay stable while others spiral out of control. And we're going to look at why some stress responses stay stable while others spiral out of control, and we're going to use the Nyquist stability criterion to examine that. And then, third, we're going to use strategies from engineering as an analogy to help you stabilize your stress response. So bear with me as I nerd out a little bit, but it is going to be super practical.

Philip Pape: 3:19

So I want to start by explaining how stress operates in your body. Going to start by explaining how stress operates in your body, right, most people think stress is just something that happens to them, an external force that they cannot control. But stress is really about how your body and your mind process and respond to those challenges. And it happens through a system, through a complex feedback system, and that's why different people respond differently, and even you might have responded differently to the same types of stress at different points in your life. Now, in engineering, we use feedback systems everywhere, right From the cruise control in your car to the thermostat in your house right, your nest thermostat. These systems are measuring the current state, they compare it to the desired state and then they make an adjustment. That's it, and your body's stress response works the same way. It takes in information about potential threats or challenges and then it adjusts your physiological and psychological state accordingly.

Philip Pape: 4:14

What most people miss is it's not the external stressors themselves that determine your stress level. It's how your internal feedback system interprets and responds to them. And this is called perceived stress, and research shows it's actually a better predictor of health outcomes than objective stressors. And it makes kind of intuitive sense, right, like how you feel in terms of stress is probably more important than, objectively, what the stress might be. And another way to think about this think about your thermostat, right? It doesn't care if it's cold outside because your neighbor left their door open or because there's a winter storm. It doesn't care, it just responds to the temperature change. So, similarly, your body doesn't distinguish between a real threat being chased by a lion right and a perceived one, it initiates the same stress response either way.

Philip Pape: 5:03

We've talked about this before and I've had guests on that talk about the sympathetic versus the parasympathetic nervous systems, the fight or flight response. So this brings us to the Nyquist stability criterion. I know it sounds kind of technical, but it's just a simple principle in control systems that helps determine whether the system remains stable or spirals out of control when disturbed. So I want to break this down in a way that will transform how you think about stress specifically. So in engineering, a stable system is one that can handle disturbances and then return to normal.

Philip Pape: 5:38

Think about the car cruise control. I mentioned that earlier. Cruise control you turn it on, it goes at the same speed without you having to have your foot on the gas pedal when you hit a hill. You get to a hill, it starts to crank up right. It adjusts the throttle to maintain speed, cranks you up and then returns to normal on flat ground. That is a form of stability. On the other hand, it's going to overreact to a disturbance. Each response triggers a bigger accelerating response and that creates what engineers call positive feedback. It's not the good kind of positive right. It's like when you put a microphone too close to a speaker and then you get that small initial sound that gets amplified, amplified, amplified, right. Or if you ever have like, if you're on Zoom on a phone and then you're near a computer, on Zoom, zoom, and all the sound starts to feed back through the speaker and amplifies that terrible, like screeching noise we've all heard. That's what that is Okay.

Philip Pape: 6:34

Your stress response can become unstable in the same way. So let's say you have a deadline coming up for work. In a stable system you would recognize okay, this is a challenge, I'm going to mobilize resources to meet it, I'm going to do it and then I'm going to return to baseline afterward. In an unstable system, the anxiety about the deadline is going to increase your heart rate, increase your muscle tension, makes you more aware of your body's stress response. Your anxiety increases further and further and further and it becomes overwhelming. It creates a vicious cycle.

Philip Pape: 7:06

So that is an important analogy for the different types of people, but even you yourself, the different ways you handle different stressors. You know I always joke to my wife that like I can handle a high level of stress because I just kind of let it brush off of me, and some people perceive that as not caring or not having a sense of urgency. But it can be helpful as well when others get stressed by something Like, let's say, we're planning to go to um, my in-laws are planning to get, they got a flight to go to a funeral and they were freaking out about all the travel arrangements. So I said, okay, let me just go book multiple health hotel rooms for our family, I'll take care of it, they don't have to worry about it. Right, and that's my way of coping to help their stress. And it can be helpful vice versa. But then other things aren't going to stress them out at all. That might make me anxious, right? So we all can relate to this.

Philip Pape: 7:58

So the big insight from this Nyquist thing is that stability depends on how the system processes and responds to feedback right and in engineering terms which, again, we're going to apply this to us as humans, with our bodies and minds. We are going to look at three factors signal delay, feedback magnitude and system damping. So I hope it isn't getting too nerdy, but it's kind of cool how we map these to your stress response. So first we have signal delay. So in engineering, delays between the input and response often cause instability. So think about taking a shower. If you have a long delay between turning the handle and getting hot water, you might overcorrect and end up scalded. Or for anybody who watched Groundhog Day again, because we just had Groundhog Day, bill Murray gets in the shower, he cranks it up and it's freezing cold, right, and you overreact. But anyway you might overreact and end up scalded. And then your stress response has similar delays. When you try to suppress or ignore the stress, it can lead to bigger emotional response later. We all have been there, right, where we push it deep down inside and it comes out ferociously later on. So that's signal delay. That's basically, you're just procrastinating or you're not dealing with it.

Philip Pape: 9:15

The second is feedback magnitude. So a stable engineering system reduces the impact of disturbances. An unstable one amplifies them. Your stress response can go either way. Some people naturally dampen stress, they feel it, they process it, they let it go, and again I feel like I'm more in that camp, just naturally, and you may not be. Others amplify it through ruminating and catastrophizing and you turn small stressors into these major crises. Right, everything is a huge deal. Again, this is not a judgment. This is just something to be aware of. Do you respond this way to stressors? So that's feedback magnitude.

Philip Pape: 9:51

The third one is system damping how quickly these oscillations settle down. So, even when it's been disturbed, do they settle down? In engineering, we add filters or dampers to prevent this. Your body has natural damping mechanisms, like deep breathing and hormonal regulation right, some that you do on purpose and some that your body does involuntarily. But they can be overwhelmed if the system becomes too unstable. Right Again, you can only cope with a certain amount of stress beyond which it starts to expand out of control. So how do we apply these principles to stabilize your stress response? So we're going to use three strategies. I know I have a lot of lists in here, one, two, threes, but hopefully you're following. I'm trying to keep it pretty organized. We're going to use three strategies that are based on this control system theory.

Philip Pape: 10:42

All right, the first one is we're going to implement a negative feedback loop. Remember we talked about feed, positive feedback in the past being a bad thing. In this case, like it amplifies, like that screeching sound when you have the microphone near the speaker. In engineering, a negative feedback stabilizes a system by counteracting those disturbances, almost think of it like noise cancellation for stress. This means you can develop habits that automatically reduce stress when it starts building. And guess what? One of the best habits is Regular movement, regular lifting and, in some cases, a brief bit of high intensity activity like sprinting or something like that, but not overdoing it with lots and lots of chronic cardio, for example, because that creates the opposite problem that increases your stress. So lifting regularly, walking regularly, are two huge ways to increase your resilience and create a physiological response that counteracts the stress hormones like cortisol, or helps regulate them. It gives you resilience. There are also other negative feedback loops you can intentionally incorporate, like progressive muscle relaxation. It's a form of mindfulness, a form of meditation, and many, many others breathing meditation and so on. It doesn't have to be one of those techniques and I will say walking alone can be a huge one for a lot of people and it's easy to do. So that is a negative feedback loop, keeping in mind that that's a good thing. In this context, you're counteracting, you're negating the stress that starts to build up.

Philip Pape: 12:16

The second strategy is reducing signal delay. So notice that these are basically counteracting the problems we talked about before, so you remember how delays. If you delay, it causes instability. Right, and in stress management, this means you want to process your stress in real time instead of suppressing it, instead of pushing it deep down into the core of your stomach. Research shows that mindfulness, meditation, really any form of relaxation, even play, can literally rewire your brain's stress response circuits to respond more quickly and appropriately to stressors. It's like upgrading your processing speed when it comes to the stress and being able to cope with it, to deal with it.

Philip Pape: 13:04

And then the third strategy is adding stability margins. Engineers never run systems at the absolute limit. You always have safety margins built in. So for your stress response, this means maintaining what I call psychological redundancy Getting enough sleep, staying hydrated, eating nutritious foods these create a buffer zone. And lifting weights it's a buffer zone. I've talked about this multiple times recently about alcohol and other things. Small stressors, then, won't immediately push you into instability. You've got a lot more buffer zone built in where you can handle these things better.

Philip Pape: 13:45

So if you take all this together, where does this approach really shine? If you measure and adjust, you can put this whole thing on steroids right. Just like we monitor control systems, you need to track your stress response and there is something called the perceived stress scale. It's a validated tool used in research to help you quantify stress levels and monitor improvements. But you don't have to get complicated. Just start by establishing a baseline and rate your stress level on a scale of 1 to 10 or 1 to 5, whatever makes sense to you. We do that with my clients all the time. As part of our biofeedback tracking In Physique University, we have a biofeedback tracker. It includes stress, among other factors, and you're just going to rate it the same time each day for a week. So normally I recommend people track biofeedback weekly, but in this case, if you're trying to dial in something, you want to do it more frequently and then you're going to implement one strategy right, we're doing this systematically One strategy for reducing stress.

Philip Pape: 14:39

I touched a little bit on that today. I didn't want to get into the actual all the possible laundry list of stress details. I actually have a guide for that, called the stress solution guide, with specific things you can do. I think we all know some things that we can do, right? I mentioned walking, lifting weights. I mentioned being resilient. I mentioned breathing meditation and so on. I mentioned walking, lifting weights. I mentioned being resilient. I mentioned breathing, meditation and so on.

Philip Pape: 14:59

Um, I had a guest on who talked about just taking 30 seconds or a minute between things in your day, between meetings, between doing an errand and another errand All of those things can increase your resiliency and your stress response. I like the pillars lifting weights, walking, uh, um, you know, eating nutritious foods, getting enough sleep those are going to be the big ones, but you're going to change one thing and then you're going to see how your stress level changes. If you're wearing an Oura ring or some other wearable, it's kind of cool to see those numbers like HRV, resilience scores and whatnot. You could look at all that, look at how your numbers change and then if the approach hasn't really worked, you could adjust the parameters, just like you would tune any system. For me, right now, the thing I'm working on is my sleep posture and let's see when this comes out, when this episode comes out. Okay, this comes out on Wednesday and this Friday the episode with Dr Peter Martoni comes out. He's a sleep expert who talks about positioning, how to have a neutral spine and use back sleeping to improve your HRV and your sleep resilience quality. So that's the thing I'm working on and I'm going to see how the numbers change. Same thing with you. Pick one thing, measure it, track it before and after.

Philip Pape: 16:12

Now, the thing that most people miss about this whole stability thing, this whole stress response thing, it's not about eliminating the disturbances, because we can't control everything outside ourselves. Right, the stoic in me stoicism, ancient philosophy that's still super relevant today says that I can only do it, I can only control what's in my realm of control and I shouldn't really care about the rest. Right, it's changing how your system responds to those stressors. The most stable systems aren't the ones that never get disturbed, they're the ones that handle the disturbances elegantly. The same is true for your stress response. The goal is not to eliminate it, it's build a system that processes it effectively. So, as we wrap up, I want to recap the key points.

Philip Pape: 16:56

Your stress response is a feedback system. It follows the same stability principles as any system. By understanding and applying what we talked about today, you can implement strategies to prevent spiraling out of control and then build lasting resilience. And it all starts from understanding your level of perceived stress and then coming up with solutions to mitigate that. And that's it. It's not avoiding disturbances, it's building the system to respond and return to baseline. And, by the way, your baseline can be much bigger and more robust by building in the big pillars, like the lifting weights and having a healthy, active lifestyle, nutritious foods and so on.

Philip Pape: 17:30

All right, if you're ready to take control of your stress response and you want personalized guidance on some of those big pillars, don't forget I do have this free 15 minute rapid nutrition assessment. Not a sales call, it's just you and me chatting about what is holding you back, what are your specific stress triggers or areas of concern with your training, nutrition whatever and create a simple action plan tailored to your needs. I say here you go, one, two, three. Here's a resource or two, totally free, have fun. If you need any other support, you know where to find me. That's all. It is Low pressure. Click the link in the show notes or visit witsandweightscom and click the big button on the top to schedule your call today. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, when it comes to stress, stability isn't about never experiencing stress, it's about having a system that returns to balance. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.