Resiliency. We’ve discussed resiliency a few times throughout the last few weeks. This article discusses how your ancestors lived their lives reflects on your resiliency today. This article focuses on a study that suggests that women who became pregnant before, during, or after a stressful time in their lives altered their babies DNA and stress threshold. The example that Fastcompany gives is:
“The two most famous studies are about Holocaust survivors, so people who became pregnant around that time, and then people who became pregnant just before, during, or after the famine, which was in the Netherlands around the same time. Those [studies] showed that people who were in starvation or stress just before they got pregnant, because they had either switched on or switched off certain stress genes, the baby was actually born with a different stress threshold than its mother’s genes would have normally given it.”
The article goes on to say that the generation that came after Holocaust survivors suffered from nightmares of being tortured and tormented even though they had never experienced anything like that before. The stress that their mothers dealt with during pregnancy altered how they deal with stress in their lives.
I generally think of myself as a calm person and I do well in stressful situations. I went on to ask my mom if she experienced any great stress while she was pregnant with me. She said "eh, not really." She then said "I believed, calm mama, calm pregnancy, calm kid." Then she brought up an example of my high stress threshold. In October of 2007, my dad was deployed and we were evacuating from the second fire that we had experienced in Southern California. During the previous evacuation in 2003, my dad was there so my mom was relatively calm because everything was being handle. When my dad was away for the second fire, my mom was scrambling around the house to collect all the irreplaceables. She was running around and talking to herself and in panic mode. I don't remember what I did, but she always tells me that I sat her down, basically told her to get ahold of herself, and prioritize.
We've been through a handful of natural disasters and negative experiences. Since that second fire, my mom will look to me for her "voice of reason" during catastrophy.
I don't know if my high stress threshold is because she was a calm mama or because that's just the type of person I am. If the study above is true and our ability to deal with stress is decided before we're born, is there anything that we can do during our own lives to grow our stress threshold?
Ask yourself if you're a calm person, and then ask your mom if she experienced any stress or trauma during pregnancy. I'm very interested to see if there is a correlation.
Thanks for reading!
Monika
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