Open the papers, watch the news on TV or read any general interest magazine and you will find some discussion on the ‘tensions’ or ‘stress’ that we face in this fast-paced computer age. Pseudo-science masquerading as solid scientific research is used to sell merchandise to relieve stress. From yogurt’ to ‘yoga’ all are touted as magic remedies to rid the body of toxins generated due to stress. The only thing that seems to work here is the money machine for the sellers! Here we will try to clear the air about what exactly constitutes stress, why it is bad and what it actually leads to.
As we look around us, we find that most people from the middle class live fairly long and die due to heart diseases, complications from diabetes or conditions related to old age. Most of these diseases are the result of a slow accumulation of damages. For a diabetic or a person suffering from artery blockage, one extra helping of dessert or that additional morsel of fried food is not immediately fatal. The ill effects occur gradually and take many years to manifest.
Compare the current scenario with the conditions prevailing about a 100 years ago, when it was common for people to succumb to the bubonic plague, dengue fever, malaria or some other virulent infectious disease. Cholera and typhoid proved to be fatal in many cases. Along with this relatively recent shift in the patterns of diseases, there have been changes in the way we perceive the disease process itself. We have come to recog¬nize the vastly complex intertwining of our biology and emotions, the endless ways in which our personalities, feelings and thoughts both reflect and influence the events in our bodies.
A critical recognition of this interaction is the under¬standing that modern diseases are exacerbated by extreme emotional disturbances. Put in common parlance, ‘stress makes us sick’. A critical shift in medicine has been this acceptance of the view that stress plays a significant role in causing or exacerbating the modern diseases of slow accu-mulation.
The recognition of this connection between emotions and biology is not recent. Reading through the literature on the subject, one can see that many sensitive clinicians intuitively recognized the role of individual differences in the vulnerability to disease. Since the 1940s, the application of rigorous scientific methods to test these vague clinical perceptions has made stress physiology—the study of how the body re¬sponds to stressful events—a real discipline.
Today, there is an extraordinary amount of physiological, biochemical, and molecular information available on how all sorts of intangibles in our lives—emotional turmoil, psychological characteristics, our place in society, and the sort of society in which we live—can affect very real body events. Purely physical events such as the damage caused due to the gumming up of our arteries by cholesterol, or heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, ulcers, growth in children, pain and a large number of other events are directly influenced by psychological events.
Looking at the evolution of humans and other species, we can see that our ancestors faced serious physical injury, predators and starvation. For an animal like the deer described in the prologue, the most upsetting things in life are acute physi¬cal stressors. The chase in the savannah is an extremely stressful event and demands immediate physiological adaptations if the prey has to survive. The body’s stress response mechanism is brilliantly adapted to handle this sort of emergency.
Chronic physical stressors can also affect an organism. Drought, famine, parasites and other events that cause star¬vation and other unpleasant complications are central events in the lives of animals and were also experienced by early human ancestors. The body’s stress responses are reasonably good at handling these sustained disasters.
Critical to our analysis is a third category of ways to get upset—psychological and social stressors.
Regardless of how poorly we get on with our family members or co-workers, or how incensed we may be with events in our life, we rarely settle these things with physical altercations. Likewise, it is rare for us to stalk and wrestle down our dinner. Essentially, we humans live long enough, well enough and are smart enough to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads. How many elephants worry about their provident fund or what they are going to say in a job interview? A critical point to note, viewed from theperspective of evolution of the animal kingdom, psychological stress is a recent invention. We can experience wildly strong emotions (provoking our bodies into a wild uproar) linked to mere thoughts.
The most important point to note is this—if you are an animal running for your life or sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted to deal with such short-term emergencies. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses—which are potentially a disaster. A large body of scientific literature makes the point that stress-related diseases emerge from the fact that we often activate a physiological system that has evolved to respond to acute physical emergencies, and we turn it on for months on end. What should have been over in a few minutes drags on for months or years and it is obvious that this will lead to major problems.