Stress Can Make You Ill Yet Can Be The Spice Of Life
Stress is the body’s response to any non specific response to any kind of demand. Stress is neither good or bad in and of itself.
Hans Selye Discovers Stress
The doctor Hans Selye first began thinking about stress when, as a 19 year old medical student working in a hospital in Vienna, he noticed patients with all sorts of different diseases had very similar looking symptoms
- losing appetite
- losing strength
- becoming listless
the same symptoms whether the patient was suffering from
- cancer
- infectious disease
- severe blood loss
In short ill people all looked ill
10 years later as a junior researcher in Canada he was tasked with injecting female rats with chemicals from cow ovaries. At the time, 1936, the idea of hormones was fairly new in fact the word hormone was first used in 1905. Selye found when he dissected the rats
- adrenaline glands were enlarged
- lymphatic system had atrophied
- peptic ulcers
BUT he found a similar response after injecting rats with toxic chemicals
AND MORE he found a similar response after just leaving rats outside for a few days in winter, which was presumably fairly cold in Canada.
This reminded him of the similar appearance of ill patients whatever they were suffering from he had seen 10 years earlier.
This lead him write about Stress as a response of the body, not directly caused by an outside agent.
Selye identified 3 stages of reaction to stress
| alarm response |
the body shows signs of stress |
| stage of adaption |
signs of stress more or less disappear as body attempts to cope with with continuing stress |
|
stage of exhaustion |
the body has run out of energy and resources to continue adaption to stress. Signs of stress reappear and death is the likely result. |
It is now felt that Selye was wrong about the third stage, perhaps this the reason why he never won a Nobel price.
A different view of the third stage is when the response becomes more damaging than the stress itself.
Why Stress
An animal, or human, needs something to motivate it in times of danger. A zebra being chased by a lion, a soldier in battle. Your heart races and blood pressure increases dramatically.
Hormones shut down those parts of bodily functions which aren’t essential to escaping the immediate danger.
In a situation where if you don’t escape the chances you are will be killed and eaten or at least killed then trying to ward off a cold or flu is a something which is best left for later.
The key point is this is something transitory, you either escape or don’t
For those who face danger and survive there is something of exhilaration which is why many people seek dangerous challenging situations to add excitement to their lives.
The problem comes when stress is long term as this can be damaging often fatally.
Stress In Humans Or Caused By Humans
Nowadays many of the stresses humans face are psychological not physical and can go on for years.
- you don’t like your boss or your job
- your boss doesn’t like you
- you are unhappy in your marriage or relationship
- you don’t have friends or a relationship
- you’re short of money
any one, or more, of these situations can continue for years, wearing your down.
Worse if you’ve been suffering from stress for years it becomes easier for a sudden new shock to seriously harm you with a heart attack, or stroke. For example
- a parent or child dies or becomes ill
- you lose your job
- you lose your home
- you get divorced
How Stress Makes Us Ill
As has already been mentioned your body reacts to stress by shutting down bodily functions it doesn’t consider necessary to respond to the stress.
Unfortunately, biologically, stress was a means of escaping from danger often a predator trying to eat you.
One of the responses to stress is to shut down, or at least weaken, your immune system. Eighty years on from Selye scientists and doctors have learned a great deal more about the details of how your bodies stress response causes the immune system to shut down, but for practical purposes all you need to know is it happens.
Have you noticed you get ill after a stressful situation has ended (finishing exams)? Your body suppresses your immune system when faced with stress. Part of the feeling of being ill is your body fighting the disease. When a stressful period ends, your body stops suppressing your immune system and it gets to work if need be.
Curiously some of the knowledge has been gained by causing stress to animals (that is non human animals).
Fight or flight is the typical stress response. ‘Scientists’ have subjected animals to stress (e.g. giving dogs electric shocks) when the animals were restrained so they could not escape the stress. What they found is animals ‘learned helplessness’, unable to escape they just accepted their fate. Later if stressed when they were able to escape the animals didn’t even try.
There is a strong message here to anyone living in a stressful situation – GET OUT.
Stress Heart Disease And Ulcers
Although the preceding sections may seem gloomy it is important to remember it is not stress itself that is harmful but your body’s response. Moreover different people may have different responses to the same stress.
Dr Malcolm Kendrick devotes one chapter of his book The Great Cholesterol Con to stress and the hypothesis stress, not cholesterol, is responsible for heart disease.
One particular form of stress he focuses on is the stress of migrating to a different country.
It is known that rates of heat disease are different in different countries, for example the rate in Japan is much lower that in USA. Japanese men who moved to California tend to have a USA rate of heart disease. Except those who retain contacts with Japan tend to retain the Japanese rate.
Hmmm, this tends to rule out lifestyle and diet.
Whilst it seems odd that an entire country can be stressed, Malcolm gives a number of examples of countries or regions suffering a particular type of stress he calls social dislocation.
One example is around half million people forcibly relocated from their homes in Glasgow to tower blocks in new towns nearby.
Another is the Soviet takeover of the Karelia region of Finland in 1948. It is fairly easy to find a description of the Soviet takeover and the high rate of heart disease (the highest in the world) and how this has dropped due to diet etc. However according to Malcolm the fact there was a control group whose diet was not changed and who also saw a drop in rates of heart disease, is much harder to find. Almost swept under the carpet!
One of the most famous examples of low rates of heart disease (well pretty much zero actually) with no obvious reason is Roseto which in the 1950s and 60s, at any rate, was largely populated with immigrants from southern Italy. In fact it’s so famous it has it’s own name Roseto Effect. Malcolm Gladwell discusses the Roseto Effect in the introduction to his book Outliers.
The explanation of the Roseto Effect is the people retained their relaxed Italian lifestyle, in particular lots of social interaction and support. It can’t have been their diet as they at a typical American diet.
Other studies, many published in British Medical Journal, found stress is related to your job and position in the hierarchy of the organization your work in.
It’s is not the people at the top that suffer the most but those at the bottom.
By now a fairly clear picture should be emerging of damaging stress being something forced upon you which you are largely not in a position to control and you don’t like. This stress may be as a result of being in an unfamiliar environment which you voluntarily entered into, but you may still suffer if there is no respite.
Coping Strategy – More Harm Than Good?
Some times we find ourselves resorting to coping strategies which only harm us in the long run.
It is almost a cliche to mention
- alcohol
- cigarettes
- drugs
but the reason it is a cliche is because it’s true!
Other strategies which have a less than positive outcome in the long run are
- violence
- aggression
- self harm
- being withdrawn
Coping Strategies Which Work
If stress is caused by lack of control over your life, it seems reasonable that you can mitigate the effects of stress by having control over some part of your life, however small.
As stress releases chemicals (hormones) to prepare for the fight or flight response maybe some physical activity or exercise will help burn them up.
But rather than going for a run by yourself why not do something more social and go dancing?
With psychological stress the problems is largely in the mind. Saying
DON’T THINK ABOUT IT
may be right but is kind of hard to do just like that.
If you can find a hobby or past times which you genuinely enjoy so that you can get lost in the activity you may even find, for a while at least, stress just melts away.
This one of the real advantages of Doing It For Yourself.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, an academic psychologist, has labelled the state where people get lost in what they are doing FLOW, which will be the subject of the next post, Flow Stress And You. Mihaly discovered the state of flow whilst researching what made people happy. Seems flow would be an ideal candidate to alleviate stress!