Stress: It’s Worse Than You Think
Stress affects your brain and body. Too much of it can have a
fatal effect. Here’s what you can do to relax.
By John Carpi, published on January 01, 1996 – last
reviewed on November 22, 2010
Psychological stress doesn’t just put your head in a vice. New
studies document exactly how it tears away at every body
system—including your brain. But get this: The experience of stress in
the past magnifies your reactivity to stress in the future. So
take a nice deep breath and find a stress-stopping routine this
instant.
Technological advances have expanded the business day. Leisure
time has shrunk. Bathing-suited business men walk beaches on
Sundays with cellular phones stuck to their ears, planning the
next morning’s meetings. Laptop computers find their way on
vacations. The family icons of today are working couples picking
up their children on their way home to dinners prepared by
caterers or fast food chefs. Grieving time has shrunk. The divorce rate hovers near its highest in history.
The concept of job security has gone the way of the dirigible.
Yet there is no time to pick up the pieces. “Just snap out of
it,” yells the therapist as he slaps his patient in a newspaper
cartoon. The caption: Time-saving single-visit psychotherapy.
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Stress has become so endemic it is worn like a badge of courage.
The business of stress reduction, from workshops to relaxation
tapes to light and sound headsets, is booming. If ours is a
culture without deep intimacy, then our relationship with stress
is the exception.
Yet not even this familiarity can cushion the findings of
research: The effects of stress are even more profound than
imagined. It penetrates to the core of our being. Stress is not
something that just grips us and, with time or effort, then lets
go. It changes us in the process. It alters our bodies—and our
brains.
We may respond to stress as we do an allergy. That is, we can
become sensitized, or acutely sensitive, to stress. Once that
happens, even the merest intimation of stress can trigger a
cascade of chemical reactions in brain and body that assault us
from within. Stress is the psychological equivalent of ragweed.
Once the body becomes sensitized to pollen or ragweed, it takes
only the slightest bloom in spring or fall to set off the
biochemical alarm that results in runny noses, watery eyes, and
the general misery of hay fever. But while only some of us are
genetically programed to be plagued with hay fever, all of us
have the capacity to become sensitized to stress.
Stress sensitization is uncharitably subversive. While the
chemical signaling systems of body and brain are running amok in
a person sensitized to stress, that person’s perception of stress
remains unchanged. It’s as if the brain, aware that the burner on
the stove is cool, still signals the body to jerk its hand away.
“What happens is that sensitization leads the brain to re-circuit
itself in response to stress,” says psychologist Michael Meaney,
Ph.D., of McGill University. “We know that what we are
encountering may be a normal, everyday episode of stress, but the
brain is signaling the body to respond inappropriately.” We may
not think we are getting worked up over running late for an
appointment, but our brain is treating it as though our life were
on the line.
Because some stress is absolutely necessary in living creatures,
everyone has a built-in gauge that controls our reaction to it.
It’s a kind of biological thermostat that keeps the body from
launching an all-out response literally over spilled milk.
Sensitization, however, lowers the thermostat’s set point, says
psychologist Jonathan C. Smith, Ph.D., founder and director of
the Stress Institute at Roosevelt University in Chicago. As a
result, the body response typically reserved for life-threatening
events is turned on by life’s mundane aggravations. In this
hothouse of hyperreactivity, bio-chemicals unleashed by stress
may boil over at the most trivial of events, like our missing a
train or being shunted to voice mail.
“Years of research has told us that people do become sensitized
to stress and that this sensitization actually alters physical
patterns in the brain,” says Seymour Levine, Ph.D., of the
University of Delaware. “That means that once sensitized, the
body just does not respond to stress the same way in the future.
We may produce too many excitatory chemicals or too few calming
ones; either way we are responding inappropriately.”
The revelation that stress itself alters our ability to cope with
stress has produced yet another remarkable finding: Sensitization
to stress may occur before we are old enough to prevent it
ourselves. New studies suggest that animals from rodents to
monkeys to humans may experience still undetermined developmental
periods during which exposure to stress is more damaging than in
later years. “For example, we have known that losing a parent when you are young is harder to get over
than if your parent dies when you are an adult,” says Jean King,
Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “What
we now believe is that a stress of that magnitude occurring when
you are young may permanently rewire the brain’s circuitry,
throwing the system askew and leaving it less able to handle
normal, everyday stress.”
It is the stew of chemicals released by such provocations that
ultimately explains the noose stress ties between mind and body.
“This new paradigm of stress demonstrates that there is a link
between psychological events and physical eruptions, between mind
and body,” King says. “The psychological events that are most
deleterious probably occur during infancy and childhood—an
unstable home environment, living with an alcoholic parent, or
any other number of extended crises.” The new paradigm also
firmly ties everyday psychological stress to such suspect
complaints as ulcers, headaches, and fatigue
The new blueprint of how we respond to stress also may explain why people have different
tolerances for stress. In the past stress tolerance may have been
chalked up to mental fortitude: “He’s a rock,” or “She’s really
bearing up under pressure.” Now it’s clear that our ability to
withstand stress has less to do with whether we are strong-willed
than with how much and what kind of stress we encountered in the
past.
Whether we end up stressed-out executives or laid-back surfers,
we all start out with the same biological machinery for
responding to stress. Stress activates primitive regions of the
brain, the same areas that control eating,
aggression, and immune response. It switches on nerve circuits
that ignite the body’s fight-or-flight response as if there were
a life-threatening danger.
From this evidence researchers have concluded that the stress
response is “wired” into the brain, that we inherit the same
ancient reactions that jump-started hunter-gatherers to escape a
charging saber-tooth tiger without having to give their actions
time-consuming thought. Only this same life-or-death reaction is
now called into play largely by non-life-threatening situations.
Studies have found the same fight-or-flight circuits all working
overtime in response to such varied stressors as extreme
exercise, the death of a loved one, an approaching deadline.
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One conclusion from the evidence is that we may be victims of
evolution, hard-wired with a stress response system that’s better
suited to a life filled with occasional life-threatening events
than one filled with everyday irritations like failing a test or
blowing a sales call. Unfortunately, when stresses become
routine, the constant biochemical pounding takes its toll on the
body; the system starts to wear out at an accelerated rate.
By responding to the stress of everyday life with the same surge
of biochemicals released during major threats, the body is slowly
killing itself. The biochemical onslaught chips away at the
immune system, opening the way to cancer, infection, and disease.
Hormones unleashed by stress eat at the digestive
tract and lungs, promoting ulcers and asthma. Or they may weaken
the heart, leading to strokes and heart disease. “Chronic stress
is like slow poison,” King observes. “It is a fact of modern life
that even people who are not sensitized to stress are adversely
affected by everything that can go wrong in the day.”
If stress has a central command post, it is the hypothalamus, a
primitive area of the brain located near where the spine runs
into the skull. By way of a dazzling array of hormonal signals,
the hypothalamus is closely connected with the nearby pituitary
gland and the distant adrenal glands, perched atop the kidneys.
The so-called hypothalamicpituitary axis (HPA) has a virtual
monopoly on basic body functions. It regulates blood pressure,
heart rate, body temperature, sleep patterns, hunger and thirst, and reproductive functions,
among many other activities.
About the size of a grape, the hypothalamus does its work by
releasing two types of signaling hormones; those that stimulate
glands to release other hormones and those that inhibit the
glands from performing their job. Among the best known of these
hormones are follicle-stimulating and luteinizing hormones,
which, dispatched on a strict schedule from the pituitary, begin
the monthly process that prepares women for pregnancy or menstruation.
Like a cherry attached by its stem, the pituitary gland hangs off
the hypothalamus waiting to receive instructions on which of its
many hormones to release and in what quantity. In hormonal terms
it is the little gland that could. The pituitary releases
substances that regulate growth, sex, skin color, bone length, and muscle strength.
It also releases adrenocorticotropin, a hormone that activates
the third part of the body’s stress system, the adrenal glands.
When stress sets off the usual ferocious communication between
the hypothalamus and the pituitary, the buck stops at the adrenal
glands. They manufacture and release the true stress
hormones—dopamine, epinephrine (also known as
adrenaline), norepinephrine (noradrenaline), and especially
cortisol. So responsive to the adrenal hormones are basic body
functions like blood flow and breathing that even minute changes
in levels of these substances can significantly affect health.
Slight overproduction of dopamine can constrict blood vessels and
raise blood pressure; a shift in epinephrine could precipitate
diabetes, or asthma, by constricting tiny airways in the lungs.
If the adrenal gland slacks off on cortisol production the result
may be obesity, heart disease, or osteoporosis; too much
of the hormone can cause women to take on masculine traits like
hair growth and muscle development and lead to one of the
greatest fears of all for aging men—baldness. High levels of cortisol also
may kill off brain cells crucial for memory.
The adrenal gland is also home of the grand daddy of all stress
reactions, the fight-or-flight response. Sensing impending danger
the hypothalamus presses out cortisol-releasing factor, a hormone
that prompts the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropin
(ACTH). Carried in the bloodstream to the adrenal glands, ACTH
triggers production of cortisol and epinephrine. The end result
of this hormonal relay is a sudden surge in blood sugar, heart
rate, and blood pressure—everything the body needs to flee or
confront the imminent danger.
The problem is, what we call the stress system is actually
responsible for coordinating much more than just our response to
stress. “Initiating a response to stress is just one of many
things the system controls,” says Jean King. “These hormones are
carefully regulated substances that direct everything from the
immune system to the cardiovascular system to our behavioral
system.”
For example, cortisol directly impacts storage of short-term
memory in the hippocampus. The stress hormones dopamine and epinephrine are also
neurotransmitters widely active in enabling communication among
brain cells. Directly and indirectly, they act on
numerous neural networks in the brain and throw off levels of
other neurotransmitters. Stress, it’s now known, alters serotonin
pathways. And through effects on serotonin, stress is now linked
with depression on one hand, aggression on the other.
The developing picture of the biochemistry of stress in some ways
takes the heat off psychology. “We used to say that physical
manifestations of stress were psychological defense mechanisms
employed as a way to shield the person from revisiting a
particularly troubling event in their past,” says Roosevelt’s
Smith. “What is far more likely is that the same chemicals being
released in response to stress are triggering physical reactions
throughout the body.”
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A torrent of studies catalogue how even a little stress can have
wide-ranging effects on the body. Researchers have found that:
- Epinephrine, released by the adrenal glands in response to
stress, instigates potentially damaging changes in blood cells.
Epinephrine triggers blood platelets, the cells responsible for
repairing blood vessels, to secrete large quantities of a
substance called ATP. In large amounts, ATP can trigger a heart
attack or stroke by causing blood vessels to rapidly narrow, thus
cutting off blood flow, says Thomas Pickering, M.D., a
cardiologist at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.
- Other substances released in the stress response impair the
body’s ability to fight infections. In one study, researchers
tracked the neurohormones of parachute jumpers. They found an 84
percent surge in nerve growth factor (NGF) among young Italian
soldiers attempting their first jump, compared with nonjumpers.
Up to six hours after they hit ground, the jumpers’ NGF levels
were 107 percent higher than in nonjumping soldiers. Released by
the pituitary gland as part of the stress response, NGF is
attracted like a magnet to disease-fighting cells, where it
hinders their ability to ward off infections. An immune system
thus suppressed can raise susceptibility to colds—or raise the
risk of cancer.
- Cortisol activation can similarly damage the immune system.
Sheldon Cohen, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon
University, gave 400 people a questionnaire designed to quantify
the amount of stress they were under. He then exposed them to
nose drops containing cold viruses. About 90 percent of the
stressed subjects (versus 74 percent of those not under stress)
caught a cold. He found they had elevated levels of
corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF). “We know that CRF
interferes with the immune system,” Cohen says. “That is likely
the physical explanation why people under stress are more likely
to catch a cold.”
- Stress hormones are also implicated in rheumatoid arthritis.
The hormone prolactin, released by the pituitary gland in
response to stress, triggers cells that cause swelling in joints.
In a study of 100 people with rheumatoid arthritis, Kathleen S.
Matt, Ph.D., and colleagues at Arizona State University found
that levels of prolactin were twice as high among those reporting
high degrees of interpersonal stress than among those not
stressed. Other studies have shown that prolactin migrates to
joints, where it initiates a cascade of events leading to
swelling, pain, tenderness. “This is clearly what people mean
when they say stress is worsening their arthritis,” Matt says.
“Here we have the hormone released during stress implicated in
the very thing that causes arthritis pain, swollen joints.”
- After being released by the pituitary gland, the stress
hormone ACTH can impede production of the body’s natural pain
relievers, endorphins, leading to a general feeling of discomfort
and heightened pain after injury. High levels of ACTH also
trigger excess serotonin, now linked to bursts of violent
behavior.
By charting the pathways stress hormones take throughout the
body, biological cartographers are doing more than mapping the
links between stress and disease. Having caught cascades of
biochemicals in flagrante delicto, researchers are
diagramming the exact lines of communication between mind and
body. Ultimately, they will force us to erase the dividing line
between what is biological and what is psychological.
Important as they are, elucidating the neurohormones released
during stress and relating them to body systems is not even the
whole story. If that were all there was to how stress works, you
would expect any physical reaction to occur immediately, since
these hormones typically remain elevated for only a short time.
And you would expect everyone to show some physical reaction.
Certainly, not all people suffer a heart attack or asthma attack
when they get upset. Some seem able to take stress in their
stride, while others routinely are hobbled.
Lawrence Brass, M.D., associate professor of neurology at Yale
Medical School, found that severe stress is one of the most
potent risk factors for stroke more so than high blood
pressure—even 50 years after the initial trauma. Brass studied 556 veterans of World War II
and found that the rate of stroke among those who had been
prisoners of war was eight times higher than among those veterans
who had not been captured.
The findings at first confused Brass. After all, the stress hormones that cause heart disease and stroke are
elevated only for a few hours after a stressful event. “I began
to realize we would have to take our understanding of stress
farther when I began to see that in some people stress can cause
disease years after the initial event,” he says. He concluded
that the immediate effect of the war trauma on the stress response system had to have
been permanent. “The stress of being a POW was so severe it
changed the way these folks responded to stress in the future—it
sensitized them.”
Their neurohormonal system was kicked off-kilter. Instead of
churning out the normal amount of hormones in the face of stress,
their systems were now so deregulated that at the slightest
provocation, they either pumped out too much of some chemicals
needed or not enough of others. “Years of this kind of hormonal
assault may have weakened their cardiovascular systems and led to
the strokes,” Brass says.
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Brass was unable to document actual changes in the neurohormonal
system. But another study, of child abuse victims, reported at a meeting of the
American Psychiatric Association, provides some of the
earliest proof that stress can physically alter people. With
magnetic resonance imaging, researchers took pictures of the
brains of 38 women, 20 with a documented history of sexual abuse,
18 without. Among those women sexually abused as children, the
researchers discovered, the hippocampus is actually smaller than
normal. A tiny seahorse-shaped structure in the middle of the
brain, the hippocampus is partially responsible
for storing short-term memory. It is activated by some of the same
neurohormones released during stress. “What we are seeing,” says
Murray Stein, Ph.D., of the University of California at San
Diego, “is evidence that psychological stress can change the
brain’s makeup.”
If stress sensitization begins with a major trauma and results in
wholesale neurochemical and neuroanatomical changes, there should
be other examples of its ravages. Perhaps, but they won’t be easy
to find, says UMass’s King. “Most kids who suffer a trauma are
not brought to the doctor,” she says. “They get through the
problem, go on with their lives, and wind up in our offices years
later, suffering from depression or heart disease. And unless we
were able measure amounts of hormones released before the initial
exposure to stress, we wouldn’t know if the levels were
elevated.” So researchers are looking at laboratory animals.
Even the lowly rat appears to become sensitized to stress. One
study at UMass found that rats repeatedly stressed by exposure to
a life-threatening cold and being deprived of maternal contact
immediately after birth became hyper-responsive to stress. “Rats
stressed from birth had a blunted release of ACTH in response to
later stress,” reports King. Then she re-exposed them to cold
after the age of 14 days, when their hypothalamic-pituitary axis
matures. “Without enough ACTH, the rats were less able to mount a
fight-or-flight response. The trauma of the early stress seems to
have altered their response system.”
“Hormonal changes from stress sensitization are quite clear in
animals,” notes Delaware’s Levine. His own studies of monkeys
document permanent changes in cortisol output in response to
stress among monkeys subjected to early psychological trauma.
“What’s interesting are the fine variations in the changes
depending on the type and time of the trauma,” Levine says.
For instance, monkeys separated from their mothers for a mere 15
minutes a day during the first few months of life develop a
stress response system that is slightly muted, compared with
monkeys reared normally. But if the monkeys are separated from
their mothers for a full three hours a day during the first few
months, their later response to stress is hyper-reactive. These
sensitized monkeys literally run around the cage or cower in a
corner in the presence of other nonthreatening animals.
“At first this may appear contradictory, but actually it is
logical,” Levine explains. “Being separated from their mothers
for a few minutes a day is stressful, but not traumatic. It is
not life-threatening, and so the animals did not have to develop
a different set of mechanisms to get through that time. The
muting of their stress response can be seen as a kind of defense
against this daily intrusion,” as if the monkeys are telling
themselves “why get all worked up over this when I know it soon
will be over.”
“On the other hand, being separated from their mother for three
hours a day is very traumatic,” observes Levine. “Anything can
happen during that time, so the monkeys must develop a heightened
sense of awareness to protect themselves. This need may
permanently alter their response so it is hyper-responsive all
the time.”
Is the same true for us? “We do know that sensitization happens,
but we don’t know what kind of stress it takes or when the stress
must take place in order to produce the changes. There are a lot
of variables in humans that are very difficult to control for,
like the emotional environment in the home, genetic
susceptibilities, and more. Some factors may cancel out the
effects of an early trauma. We don’t know.”
The most likely truth about stress sensitization is that it is not a simple
alteration in the amount of any single stress hormone. “It takes
finely-tuned amounts of many neurohormones for the
hypothalamic-pituitary axis to remain in balance,” says Georgia
Witkin, Ph.D., director of the Stress Program at Mt. Sinai
Medical Center in New York. “No one thing is going to explain
stress because there is not just one chemical reaction to stress.
And it also does not mean that everyone who loses a parent or is the victim of a violent crime will
suffer from stress the rest of his life. There are things about
individuals—genetic susceptibilities, pre-existing medical
conditions, the environment they were brought up in, any
alteration that may have taken place in their HPA axis—that must
all be factored in.
“But the first pieces of the puzzle are being put into place.
Looking at stress as a chemical reaction and realizing that this
reaction, if strong enough, can change how we react in the
future, offers the possibility of explaining many things we have
witnessed regarding stress. For instance, the reactions we see in
rats that are exposed to early trauma may give us a biological perspective on the
phenomenon of learned helplessness. Perhaps what we call learned
helplessness is biologically-programmed helplessness. If these
animals become physically unable to respond to stress because
trauma has altered their biology, we can’t really call that
learned behavior.”
If this new picture of stress is not yet quite in full focus,
that’s because it requires the melding of disciplines ranging
from genetics to psychology to medicine, and
demands a new theory of mind/body interactions. But it holds the
promise of entirely new strategies to combat stress.
Roosevelt’s Smith envisions the day when “we may be able to
develop drugs that can retune the entire neurochemical
system. I think it’s going to take years more research to better
understand how an early trauma actually alters the neurochemical
system. What is the mechanism by which psychological stress
changes the way the brain communicates with the body? Does the same
stress cause the same changes all the time? When are the
developmental periods during which stress may be most harmful? As
we continue to unveil the complex interactions between the mind
and body, we may be able to isolate these reactions. That raises
the possibility we can develop drugs to change them.”
For now, says UMass’s Jean King, “we have to remember that the
reason some people deal poorly with current events is because of
a past trauma. We must remember that there are physical reactions
in our bodies when we are under stress and the extent to which we
endure these reactions may be dictated by our past. Telling
someone to ‘just take it easy’ is of no help. We are still a long
way from knowing just what to say, but we are getting there.
A Smorgasbord of Stress-Stoppers
The future may hold specific ways of desensitizing brain and body
so that they do not automatically hyper-respond to minor
provocations. But for now, recognition of stress sensitization
requires one all-important change in the way most of us approach
de-stressing.
“If you wait until you’re feeling stressed before you employ some
technique for managing stress,” contends psychologist Robert
Epstein, Ph.D., “it’s already too late. You need to have a bag of
tricks that you can deploy proactively. If you turn to them
throughout the day, that changes your threshold of stress
tolerance.”
Epstein, director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral
Studies and a researcher at San Diego State University, insists
that “it’s more important than ever to learn as many antistress
techniques as possible, as young as possible.”
“What we can now get out of the notion of sensitization is that
people being treated for stress need individualized therapies,”
adds Saki F. Santorelli, Ed.D., associate director of the Stress
Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical
Center. “If we are saying that everyone responds to stress
differently because of past experiences, then as therapists we
need to be flexible and allow each person to focus on the part of
therapy that works best for them. The only way
to find that out is by trying different stress-reduction
techniques.”
There is no one-size-fits-all way to reduce stress. For example,
“study upon study has shown that simple relaxation does not work
in many people,” says Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D., of Mt. Sinai Medical
Center in New York. “Telling someone who has been sensitized to
stress to just relax is like telling an insomniac to just fall
asleep.”
“What you don’t want to do is resort to quick fixes that have no
staying power,” says Santorelli. “Smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, binging on
food; these are sure-fire stress failures. They may give the
impression that they are relieving tension, but they will not
work over time and sooner or later you will be right back where
you started.” He also advises those who feel stressed to avoid
coffee and high-fat foods. “Caffeine is a stimulant and foods
high in fat make the body work overtime to digest them, so both
will probably add to your level of stress.”
Mindfulness Meditation
At Santorelli’s clinic, patients are taught mindfulness
meditation, which comes out of the Buddhist tradition.
Practitioners set aside 20 to 40 minutes a day when they focus on
calming and becoming aware of their bodies with the aim of
catching them—and interrupting them—in the act of
hyper-responding to stress. “But the meditation really becomes a
way of life. Once you begin practicing you realize that whenever
you start feeling stressed during the day you are able to
retrieve the feelings of relaxation you get during deep
meditation. It becomes a way to take a few breaths and settle
down just when you feel like you are beginning to explode.”
Other forms of meditation use other devices to bring on moments
of quiet contemplation, but all are designed to get you to focus
on your body. “The most important thing is becoming aware of your
body so you can sense when you are getting stressed. Meditation
is an excellent way to do that” says Santorelli. “But it’s not
for everyone.”
Biofeedback
If meditation is not for you, maybe biofeedback is. There are
three main forms of it: electromyography (EMG), galvanic skin
response (GSR), and electroencephalography (EEG). By attaching
electrodes to a body system that readily reacts to
stress—muscles, skin, and brain waves, respectively—you can monitor your
actual stress level and learn to control, even reduce
it. Modern biofeedback devices give off some signal a blinking
light, a bell—that announces a high level of tension. You
concentrate on slowing the blinking light or bell.
Studies have found that each form of biofeedback works best for
specific stress-related problems. EMG biofeedback, for example,
reduces tension headaches; it allows people to focus and relax
the muscles in the forehead that cause head pain. GSR seems to
work best for stress-induced migraines, which tend to coincide
with a rise in body temperature. EEG biofeedback leads to the
deepest relaxation states.
What Calms You
But you don’t have to meditate or go to a biofeedback clinic to
avoid stress. “I meditate regularly, but when I am feeling
unusually stressed I practice yoga or go exercise or tend to my
garden or I hang out with family or even just read and write,”
Santorelli says. “You have to become aware of what calms you
best.”
For Jean King, Ph.D., of the UMass Medical School, listening to
music, going for a walk, or exercising always seems to put her
mind at ease. “I love the water, so if I’m having a rough day I
just go and look at it. I don’t even have to go in, all have to
do is be near it.”
Boston University biologist Eric Widmaier, Ph.D., confides that
he used to combat stress by running and exercising. “But I’ve
changed to a more thoughtful approach.” He is an advocate of
“internal conversations” in which he asks himself, “am I doing
the right thing?” But the most important technique, he says, is
“to learn to say no. People are constantly pushing at us by
asking for favors.”
Relaxation Response
One of the best-studied stress-relievers is the relaxation
response, first described by Harvard’s Herbert Benson, M.D. Its
great advantage is that it requires no special posture or place.
Say you’re stuck in traffic when you’re expected at a meeting. Or
you’re having trouble falling asleep because your mind keeps
replaying some awkward situation.
- Sit or recline comfortably. Close your eyes if you can, and
relax your muscles.
- Breathe deeply. To make sure that you are breathing deeply,
place one hand on your abdomen, the other on your chest. Breath
in slowly through your nose, and as you do you should feel your
abdomen (not your chest) rise.
- Slowly exhale. As you do, focus on your breathing. Some
people do better if they silently repeat the word one as they
exhale; it helps clear the mind.
- If thoughts intrude, do not dwell on them; allow them to pass
on and return to focusing on your breathing.
Although you can turn to this exercise any time you feel
stressed, doing it regularly for 10 to 20 minutes at least once a
day can put you in a generally calm mode that can see you through
otherwise stressful situations.
Cleansing Breath
Epstein, who has searched the world literature for techniques
people have claimed valuable for coping, focuses on those that
are simple and powerful. He calls them “gems,” devices that work
through differing means, can be learned in minutes, can be done
anytime, anywhere, and have a pronounced physiological effect. At
the top of his list is the quickest of all—a cleansing breath.
Take a huge breath in. Hold it for three to four seconds. Then
let it out v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. As you blow out, blow out all the
tension in your body.
Relaxing Postures
“The research literature demonstrates that sitting in certain
positions, all by itself, has a pronounced effect,” says Epstein.
Sit anywhere. Relax your shoulders so that they are comfortably
rounded. Allow your arms to drop by your sides. Rest your hands,
palm side up, on top of your thighs. With your knees comfortably
bent, extend your legs and allow your feet, supported on the
heels, to fall gently outward. Let your jaw drop. Close your eyes
and breathe deeply for a minute or two.
Passive Stretches
It’s possible to relax muscles without effort; gravity can do it
all. Start with your neck and let your head fall forward to the
right. Breathe in and out normally. With every breath out, allow
your head to fall more. Do the same for shoulders, arms, back.
Imagery
Find a comfortable posture and close your eyes. Imagine the most
relaxed place you’ve ever been. We all have a place like this and
can call it to mind anywhere, any time. For everyone it is
different. It may be a lake. It may be a mountain. It may be a
cottage at the beach. Are you there?
Five—Count ‘Em, Five—Tricks
Since you can never have too many tricks in your little bag, here
are some “proven stress-busters” from Paul Rosch, M.D., president
of the American Institute of Stress:
- Curl your toes against the soles of your feet as hard as you
can for 15 seconds, then relax them. Progressively tense and
relax the muscles in your legs, stomach, back, shoulders, neck.
- Visualize
lying on a beach, listening to waves coming in and feeling
the warm sun and gentle breezes on your back. Or, if you
prefer, imagine an erotic fantasy or picture yourself in
whatever situation makes you happiest.
- Set aside 20 to 30 minutes a day to do anything you want—even
nothing.
- Take a brisk walk.
- Keep a music player handy and loaded with relaxing, enjoyable
music.
“Beating stress is a matter of removing yourself from
the situation and taking a few breaths,” says Rosch. “If I find
myself getting stressed I ask myself ‘is this going to matter to
me in five years?’ Usually the answer is no. If so, why get
worked up over it?”
The Power of Understanding
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Simply knowing about stress sensitization seems to help some. “We
tell patients about stress sensitization and I see a change in
them,” Yehuda says. “We explain that they have inappropriate
reactions to stress because something has gone wrong with control
mechanisms in the brain. It is like a light goes on and they can
see: ‘Oh, so that may be the problem.’ They do the same meditation and therapy but they are aware of the basis of their
problem. There is something for them to focus on. There is a
reason for them to say ‘I’m not crazy. This is something real.’”
So You Think This Is The “Age Of Stress?”
Quick, which would you rather be: late to work or lunch for a
lion? The stress response we have today is out of sync with
current needs. But it once was a Jurassic perk.
Nowadays, we are bombarded with what might be called the
mythology of stress, which suggests that our psychological and
physiological well-being is constantly threatened by degrees of
stress unparalleled in history. Nothing could be farther from the
truth.
What are some of these real or perceived stressors with which we
continually do battle? Coping with rush-hour traffic, job and
financial difficulties, troubled relationships, and family
problems are just a few of hundreds of stressful stimuli that can
be identified.
Anxiety over personal problems (will I be able to pay the rent
this month?), or more global concerns (will there be another
war?) is another type of stress that we all encounter much too
often.
Nonetheless, anxiety and these other stressors are not immediate
threats to survival, even if they do raise our blood pressure a
bit now and then. Of greater concern is that the internal defense
mechanisms of the body respond to these types of psychological
stimuli in the same way as they would respond to life-threatening
ones.
Why is this unfortunate? Because over the long haul, excess
release of potent stress-fighting factors like the adrenal-gland
hormones cortisol and epinephrine (also known as
adrenaline) can suppress the immune system, cause ulcers, produce
muscle atrophy, elevate blood sugar, place excessive demands on
the heart, and eventually lead to the death of certain brain
cells.
A person in the midst of a divorce does not require the hormonal, neuronal,
and metabolic responses of someone who falls through thin ice on
a wintry pond—yet in both cases the same internal changes are
occurring.
Why do emotionally stressful events elicit the same chemical
changes in our bodies as do events that are actual threats to
survival? The answer may lie in a comparison of stress as we know
it today and stress as it must have been when vertebrate animals
were first evolving.
Are we really any more “stressed out” than our prehistoric
ancestors? Presumably not, since the defense mechanisms that
developed in mammals like ourselves did so very early in the
evolution of life. We even see similar biological responses to
stress in non-mammalian vertebrates like birds and reptiles.
These defenses consist of hormonal and neuronal signals that
increase breathing, accelerate heart rate, increase blood
pressure, increase the liver’s ability to pump sugar into the
bloodstream, and open up blood vessels in the large muscles to
maximize the delivery of nutrients and oxygen.
The net effect is an animal that has lots of fuel in its blood, a
more forceful heart to pump the blood around, plenty of oxygen,
and efficient muscles. For an antelope in the wild that has
spotted a nearby lion, these changes are exactly what the
antelope needs to avoid becoming a meal.
Not surprisingly, then, animals evolved internal mechanisms to
combat the stresses of infection, starvation, dehydration and
pain, to name a few. Cortisol breaks down bone, muscle, fat, and
other body tissues to provide material for the liver to convert
into sugar. This sugar, essentially formed by the body’s own
self-digestion, can supply the needs of the heart and brain
during a crisis. The natural pain-killer endorphin developed to
combat severe pain.
Picture the antelope being attacked by the lion, but escaping to
live another day. Its endorphin would allow the animal to cope
with the pain of its wound, if only temporarily, and continue
with the herd. Other hormones enable the kidney to retain more
water than normal during periods of drought and dehydration.
All of these varied measures are short-term responses to very
different types of stress, but they act in a concerted way to
give an organism a fighting chance to get back on its feet.
Imagining the types of stress our paleolithic forebears must have
encountered makes our daily aggravations seem much less
overwhelming. Prior to the advent of agriculture, the typical
cave-dweller would rarely have had the luxury of a steady and
nutritious diet. On the contrary, malnutrition, vitamin
and mineral deficiencies, even starvation would have been
extremely common in the winter months, and sporadic dehydration
from lack of clean or available water may have been common in the
summer.
Hypothermia was a constant threat in the winter, especially in
northern climes during the many ice ages. Injuries and infections
that resulted from untreated minor wounds or parasite invasion
would not only have been physiologically stressful but often
lethal. Anthropological data suggest that our ancestors suffered
many of the same maladies that continue to plague us today
(arthritis, back problems, tooth decay, osteoporosis, to name a
few).
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However, as stressful as those conditions are for modern man,
they would have been far more stressful at a time when no medical
treatment of any kind was available.
What about the other type of stress that is not life-threatening,
but is perceived to be of potential danger? When the antelope
spotted the lion, there was not yet physical damage to the
antelope’s body. Nonetheless, the hormonal systems responded as
if the damage was already done, in anticipation of impending
doom. If the crisis were luckily averted, a complex system of
hormonal feedback loops would apply a brake on the stress
response to prevent unabated secretion of cortisol and other
stress hormones.
Our prehistoric ancestors did not need to negotiate city traffic
and deal with short-tempered bosses, but they had their share of
psychological stress that produced no actual physical bodily
insult.
Not knowing when (or if) your next meal will come would have been
(and for much of the world’s population continues to be) a
chronic source of anxiety. Each empty-handed trip back to the
cave would have increased the tribe’s fears for the next day.
For that matter, obtaining a meal might have meant coping with
the terror of chasing down a herd of animals much faster and
larger than oneself, using a puny flint arrowhead tied to a
stick.
Prehistoric man also differed in one profound way from modern
man. Although an awareness of the cycles of nature and physical
principles like gravity would likely have been present in even
our most primitive ancestors, an understanding of the forces of
nature would have completely eluded them.
Having no understanding of science meant having no sense of
control over one’s environment. Ancient man appears to have
worried endlessly about celestial “beings” (sun gods, moon gods,
etc.), and we know that until relatively recent times it was
common for people to assign human traits to these deities.
This would have implied that it was within the realm of
possibility for, say, the sun god to feel angry or neglected one
day, thus deciding not to rise and plunging the world into
darkness and chaos. Imagine going to sleep each night fretting that you may have failed
to properly perform a certain worshipful ritual and that as a
consequence your entire tribe or family might be forever doomed
to darkness and misery.
From both a physical and a psychological vantage point, our
ancestors lived a much more stressful existence than we do today.
The mechanisms that evolved to combat the deleterious effects of
those stressors are still intact and usually serve us well.
However, we clearly make things worse for ourselves. Take
compulsive exercisers. These people can actually become addicted
to strenuous exercise, because this behavior imposes a severe
stress on metabolism and results in the steady release of
endorphin. Responsible for “runner’s high,” this pain-killer is
similar to morphine in its addictive capabilities.
Extreme exercise also releases cortisol, which though useful in
maintaining circulatory and respiratory function, can lead to
immunosuppression, bone loss, hypertension, and death of brain cells. In yet another scenario, meeting a
deadline at work is a source of pressure, but is not
life-threatening, and yet it contributes to ill health by
invoking an unnecessary release of stress hormones.
Are we stressed in today’s society? Of course we are. But the
important thing to remember is that all animals, including
ourselves, are confronted with innumerable types of stress and
always have been. We should ignore the incessant mantra of ours
being the Age of Stress and put things in a more historical and
evolutionary perspective.
Given the choice, who wouldn’t prefer the aggravation of two
working parents getting their kids off to day care or
school on time to the dread of being eaten in one’s sleep by a
lion?
TAKE THE STRESS TEST BELOW
Are you feeling stressed out? If so, you’re not alone. The quiz
below will help you assess your own stress levels.
Start by circling all of the items that apply to you.
- I find myself less eager to go back to work or to resume my
chores after a weekend.
- I feel less and less patient and/or sympathetic listening to
other people’s problems.
- I ask more “closed-ended questions to discourage dialogue
with friends and co-workers than “open-ended” ones to encourage
it.
- I try to get away from people as soon as I can.
- My dedication to work, exercise, diet, and friendships is waning.
- I am falling further behind in many of the responsibilities
in my life.
- I am losing my sense of humor.
- I find it more and more difficult to see people socially.
- I feel tired most of the time.
- I don’t seem to have much fun anymore.
- I feel trapped.
- I know what will make me feel better, but I just can’t push
myself to do it and I’ll “Yes, but” any suggestions that people
make.
Now, add up the number of items you circled, and check your score
below:
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- 0 to 3: More exhausted than stressed out
- 4 to 6: Beginning to stress out
- 7 to 9: Possibly stressed out
- 10 to 12: Probably stressed out
If you’re feeling stressed it may be time to talk to someone who
can help.
Contact Peace of Mind Counseling Services, LLC. and see what
options may help you.
222 Professional Way Ste. 5
Wellington, FL 33414
561-729-6092
www.completeintervention.com
POMCounseling@yahoo.com
Date Published: Sep 19, 2011 - 9:57 am
Wronged
Victims
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