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Key points
- Stress arising from threats to social safety is most likely to affect biological outcomes.
- By altering how we perceive social situations, we can reshape our biology.
- The connection between our psychology, the brain, and the immune system has evolutionary advantages.
Not all stressors have the same impact on health. Stress arising from threats to social safety is most likely to affect psychological, biological, and clinical outcomes.
This is the conclusion UCLA clinical psychologist George Slavich reached after decades of investigating the biology of stress. By measuring blood and saliva samples of participants before and after they perform socially stressful tasks such as public speaking, Slavich studies how stress activates the immune system, transforming the body from a relatively calm to a threat-preparedness state. These changes occur rapidly and are significant in magnitude—several hundred genes can change within 10 to 15 minutes. Moreover, these changes appear to persist for at least an hour following the stressor.
“The biggest aha-moment for me has been that being stressed for even 5 to 10 minutes can reshape my biology at the level of gene expression,” says Slavich.
Social Safety Theory
Based on these insights, Slavich developed Social Safety Theory—an evolutionary-grounded framework for understanding the biology of stress and its interaction with the brain and the immune system. The theory proposes three key ways that our social experiences promote or degrade health:
- Socially safe situations (environments characterized by acceptance, inclusion, connection, belonging, harmony, and support) and socially threatening situations (circumstances marked by conflict, aggression, criticism, disapproval, discrimination, isolation, and rejection)
- Perceived social safety and social threat (how the individual assesses a specific social situation or interaction)
- Social safety schemas (mental representations of the social self, world, and future, encompassing aspects of social safety and social threat)
A Responsibility and an Opportunity
Our biology’s susceptibility to undulations of our social environments can be daunting—in part because it’s not always possible to surround ourselves with warm relations and avoid social conflict. Slavich, however, sees this as an opportunity to reshape our health by focusing on how we think about our surrounding social world.
“Although we cannot always control our circumstances, including what others say or do, we can control our thoughts about these situations,” says Slavich. “If I perceive a social situation as involving conflict or evaluation, it will lead to changes in my peripheral biology that can have health-damaging effects. The upside is that the power to reimagine social interactions is within our control. By altering how we perceive social situations, we can remodel our biology and, potentially, reshape our health.”
Here are three questions on stress with Slavich.
What have you learned from investigating stress from a psycho-neuro-immunological lens?
GS: The brain, the immune system, and our psychology are tightly interlinked. When we experience a stressful event, the brain will produce thoughts and emotions in reaction to it. Our psychology will influence whether that threat perception persists, and how we step in to down-regulate it. The immune system’s goal is to keep us biologically safe. When the brain perceives the body to be in a socially threatening circumstance, it’s as if the brain picks up its red phone and calls on the immune system to mobilize itself by releasing immune cells throughout the body. Those immune cells then release small proteins called cytokines, which are the main actors of the immune system. Among other things, cytokines increase inflammation throughout the body, which, in turn, accelerates wound healing and recovery in the short term, but can negatively impact health in the long run.
Ultimately, those of our ancestors who monitored the social environment for signals of social conflict, isolation, or rejection would have an immune system response that led to more effective wound healing and bacterial containment response. In fact, people whose brains and immune systems mounted a prepotent response to threat theoretically would have been able to pass on their genes more efficiently than the brains that waited until the body was actually physically wounded before initiating a healing response.
The ability for the brain to communicate effectively with the immune system would have thus been highly conserved over the course of evolution. The connection between our psychology, the brain, and the immune system has huge biological advantages and is partly what enabled us to effectively pass on our genes.
Why are our social connections such key sources of stress and, simultaneously, well-being?
GS: There are many benefits to friendly, warm, dependable social bonds. These connections increase our likelihood of physical nurturance and protection, food resources, and finding a mate. If you’re socially isolated or in relationships filled with conflict, your risk for physical danger and wounding goes up, and your likelihood of accessing required resources goes down. Since close social bonds offer many advantages, our brains are finely tuned to pay special attention to them in the environment. Even the stress we experience from other sources is often compounded by the social element. For example, what makes failure at work even more stressful is the thought that you’ve let other people down or that your co-workers will think negatively about you.
But our ability to engage in theory of mind, to collaborate and to rely on each other, is a double-edged sword. The downside of this incredible ability is that it enables us to live in a symbolic universe. More specifically, our interactions can be recreated in our minds and live on long after the actual interaction has terminated. That’s why the brain is such a critical piece for the immune system: It can continue to keep that immune system response activated for long after a threat has passed.
What are some interventions for a more resilient stress response?
GS: I like a two-pronged approach. One is applying a technique from cognitive behavior therapy called cognitive restructuring. The idea behind cognitive restructuring is that you are not your thoughts. Rather, your thoughts are mere hypotheses about the social environment—fleeting impressions about things you are observing. The cognitive restructuring process includes inducing some space between us and our thoughts and emotions. To accomplish this, you can write a particularly stressful thought down on paper and then, look for evidence that supports and that doesn’t support the thought. You then revise the original thought in light of the evidence, which often results in viewing the world in a more fair and balanced way that tempers the emotional heat.
The second approach is to address mind wandering using mindfulness techniques. Every time we symbolically represent a social interaction in our mind, we have the potential to strongly influence our biology. Throughout the course of a day, when our mind wanders to the past and the future about the things that have already happened or that might happen—that can, in turn, affect our health. That’s not so problematic when we have positive thoughts about the past or the future. However, when those thoughts are negative, we are effectively mounting an inflammatory response that has no current functional purpose. Practicing mindfulness (e.g., by mindful breathing) can be helpful in this context since we are bringing our focus back to the present, where (most of the time) things are just fine.
Many thanks to George Slavich for his time and insights. Professor Slavich is a renowned stress researcher and director of the Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research at UCLA.
References
Slavich, G. M., Roos, L. G., Mengelkoch, S., Webb, C. A., Shattuck, E. C., Moriarity, D. P., & Alley, J. C. (2023). Social Safety Theory: Conceptual foundation, underlying mechanisms, and future directions. Health Psychology Review, 17(1), 5–59.
