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  • Factual Dispatch #54 - Emotional Inflammation & Allostatic Load

Factual Dispatch #54 - Emotional Inflammation & Allostatic Load

You're gonna carry that weight, but you don't have to.

January 18, 2021

While the rest of the country is busy misquoting MLK Jr. and Klansplaining direct action & non-violence to each other, I wanted to do something orthogonal to that. Many of us are exhausted, but without the language to explain why “this” exhaustion feels different, it’s hard to know how to fix it. I’m here to tell you, not only are you right, there is language to describe it.

It’s not just that Americans are burned out, it’s that many have been burned out for so long, they don’t know what the reverse feels like anymore. With the inauguration of Joe Biden, many will be hoping to put down some of the psychic weight. But, that isn't a big help for most. The changing of the guard won’t relieve a lot of the tangible pressures that were present in American life before Trump, as those conditions will be with us long after he’s gone, like the memory of having your neo-cortex swabbed for that ‘rona test through your nasal cavity.

Two concepts that I didn’t learn in graduate school were critical in helping me survive the last year, putting my reactions and symptoms in context. They are “Allostatic Load” and “Emotional Inflammation.” No pop quiz at the end, scout's honor.

Allostatic Load was first theorized in 1993, and I’ve still not seen it in wide use. VICE put the idea into regular people language back in April, and I’ve been sharing the concept using their words ever since.

Nancy Sin, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, says that in stressful situations like this, there are physiological responses in our bodies. “Our stress hormones increase. We prepare to fight or flee,” said Sin. And as this pandemic continues and isolation drags on, “we’re having a lot of these physiological adaptations, each time we feel stressed, each time we feel worried. And over time, these repeated hits, physiologically and psychologically, can accumulate.”

That accumulation is called the allostatic load, essentially the damage on our bodies when they’re repeatedly exposed to stress. And while it feels like I’m doing nothing most days, my brain is still dealing with the anxiety and strain of this pandemic. I’m exhausted not because my body is working hard, but because my brain is.

This is before you layer neurodiverse brain structures, mental illness, structural racism (which absolutely is a thing that erodes your functioning, and your colleagues who disagree can take it up with the New England Journal of Medicine), poverty, and actual harassment and abuse. It hits us all uniquely, and we all respond to mental illness triggers, stressors, and carrying that weight, differently.

To stress, introverts might lighten their allostatic load by taking alone time, while the forced isolation this year is wearing on extroverts deeply. This continued assessment of risk, uncertainty, and low-levels of stress hormones in your system at all time erode your executive functioning. If you’re a car person, think of it as driving with the E-brake on all the time. You can probably come to a complete stop faster, but it’s murder on a dozen components of the vehicle, which will need to be replaced much more often.

While this might not sound like the biggest reach of an idea, some skeptics might be wondering how the jump from mental to physical actually happens. The idea of inflammation, both physical and emotional, builds the bridge nicely. The research helps makes it easier to understand that inflammation can produce physical fatigue, in a spectrum of diseases, from chronic fatigue & depression to cancer and AIDS. 

In a similar way, emotional inflammation is the label (given in 2020 by Stacey Colino & Lise Van Susteren) given to how your emotions tend to get unwieldy when you’re fatigued. Sound familiar? From the wonderful article in Psyche:

A recent study, for instance, revealed that adults who experienced considerable anger over the course of a week had higher blood levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), a marker of chronic low-grade inflammation; another study found a strong association between depression and higher IL-6 levels. A 2018 study found that several anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, are associated with increased levels of C-reactive protein, another biomarker of chronic inflammation. You get the picture.

…People have been hurting emotionally and there’s little mystery as to why: we are shaken by news about gun violence and hate crimes, the ongoing stream of sexual abuse and misconduct scandals, racial injustices, human rights violations, disasters in the natural world, the climate crisis, as well as political discord and dysfunction in the US and around the world. COVID-19 is just the new kid on the block.

Then, these kinds of society-level challenges are superimposed upon our own day-to-day challenges ­– coping with demanding jobs for which we might not be sufficiently compensated, the high cost of modern life, raising kids in a world with increasingly difficult challenges and dangerous temptations, and the like. When we’re fortunate enough to begin recovering from one trigger or trauma, another often comes along and becomes the emotional equivalent of reopening the wound and ramping up inflammation anew.

Indeed, there can be a priming effect: when you’re in the throes of intense stress or emotional inflammation, you can become more sensitive, both physiologically and psychologically, to the next stressor you encounter. It’s an effect that’s a bit like throwing gas on a simmering flame – the fire gets bigger, hotter, angrier. Research showed that after reading negative news reports, women are more likely to remember the information for longer than men, and experience more enduring physiological responses – namely, a greater rise in cortisol in response to a stressful activity that occurs the next day.

Emotional inflammation reduces one’s ability to cope with the everyday, and in my opinion, adds to the “mp/mana”costs of doing the “right” things (going to work, not yelling at your partner, living on things other than coffee and cigarettes, etc.). This depletes your executive functioning, as all of the things in your allostatic load are both heavier and somehow fighting with each other now.

This is one of the reasons why the “Firehose of Falsehoods,” the strategy pioneered by Putin, but used to great effect by the “alternative fact” eco-system on Fox, OANN, Newsmax, the battalion of trash websites and social streams. Flatly false information can be dismissed out of hand, using no mental effort. Partially true information requires critical analysis, to ferret out what is true/useful, and what’s trash. This finding was first academically documented in 2012 in Psychological Science in the Public Interest: 

The main reason that misinformation is sticky, according to the researchers, is that rejecting information actually requires cognitive effort. Weighing the plausibility and the source of a message is cognitively more difficult than simply accepting that the message is true – it requires additional motivational and cognitive resources. If the topic isn’t very important to you or you have other things on your mind, misinformation is more likely to take hold.

And when we do take the time to thoughtfully evaluate incoming information, there are only a few features that we are likely to pay attention to: Does the information fit with other things I believe in? Does it make a coherent story with what I already know? Does it come from a credible source? Do others believe it?

Misinformation is especially sticky when it conforms to our preexisting political, religious, or social point of view. Because of this, ideology and personal worldviews can be especially difficult obstacles to overcome. Even worse, efforts to retract misinformation often backfire, paradoxically amplifying the effect of the erroneous belief.

This is why a lot of parents, uncles, father-in-laws, and other boomers across the country have what Twitter refers to as “broken brains.” The more misinformation you consume, the more you’re likely to share it.

“Older adults consume more misinformation and are more likely to share misinformation,” said Briony Swire-Thompson, a senior research scientist at Northeastern University who specializes in social media networks. During the 2016 election, users over 65 shared more fake news than any other age group and seven times more than users between 18 and 29. In 2020, Trump has dedicated almost half of his reelection campaign budget to Facebook ads — many of which include blatant misinformation — to users over 65 years old. 

It’s all fun and games until it’s your family member who gets sucked into QAnon, or your brother who starts hanging out with the Oathkeepers. This episode of the podcast “You're Wrong About” dives deeply into the phenomenon, in case you finish this dispatch and need an hour more on the topic:

Which is why I’m increasingly sympathetic to the run of the mill QAnon cultist screaming at the Chipotle employee who asked them to put on a mask. They're usually-broke, usually-exhausted, and usually-betrayed by the Capitalist class. Don’t worry, I’m way more angry at Jenna (Karen who takes a private jet to the insurrection), and her capitalist & rentier-class friends who made billions this year. All while shoveling so much of this bilge into our faces that mass vaccination of a pandemic is a partisan issue, equivalent to squabbles over the EITC or high capacity magazines.

Community, walkable neighborhoods, transparent, accountable government, and a distinct lack of Emperor Tang, all things good for inflammation. Both physical and emotional I’d wager, though more research is needed to confirm my hypothesis. I guess what I’m saying is, we gotta come together y’all.

The light is coming back, ever so slowly. Look busy.

Yours,t