Everyone knows stress is bad for you, right? It’s a common experience in our society — commenting on our stress levels, experiencing our lives as stressful, etc. Psychologists have been thinking about stress for more than 50 years, since Hans Selye fumbled with the mice in his lab.
Selye was an endocrinologist working at the Université de Montréal. He injected his mice with a wide variety of extracts from various organs, expecting to find different effects on the mice as a function of the various extracts. Instead, all the mice suffered the same consequences – stomach ulcers, swelling of the thymus and adrenal glands, and other dreadful effects. These consequences were not caused by the injections, but instead by Selye’s clumsy handling of the mice! He dropped them, he fumbled with them, he required several desperate grabbing attempts before he caught them, etc. This environment was very stressful for the mice, so the physical consequences Selye noted were due to the overall stressful environment, not the different substances being injected. The scientific process can unfold in surprising ways.
You are probably familiar with the common feelings of stress: perhaps your heart races, or pounds; your muscles become tense; perhaps you get a headache; maybe your jaw becomes clenched. These experiences are not pleasant, but they do not represent the real damage that stress can cause. The real damage to your body is due to stress hormones that are released in response to your body’s demands. These hormones – by themselves – are not bad! They mobilize you to run from danger. They enable your body to use its resources in the most efficient way, to save you from trouble. If you turned a corner and came face to face with a lion, you’d need to be able to run away, and fast. Your body would not expend energy digesting the food in your stomach, it would direct energy towards helping you run away.
This is fine, in short bursts. Our bodies were made to use stress hormones in this way. The problem comes when we are in chronic stress; Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research, National Museum of Kenya, wrote a fascinating book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers with this central idea. Zebras are the prey of lions; they may indeed turn a corner and face a lion, which might kill them. Stress hormones mobilize the zebra’s resources and help it escape. The system “turns on,” and then it “turns off.” In a way, zebras live in the moment.
The turning off aspect is critical; these stress hormones are expensive! Stress hormones – adrenaline, glucocorticoids – can help save your life in a momentary crisis, but if they stay active, the physical prioritization become quite damaging to your body. As Sapolsky notes, “The body doesn’t work on expensive long-term building projects when it’s under stress. If a tornado is bearing down on you, it’s not the day to paint the garage; if the lion’s on your tail, worry about ovulating or growing antlers or making sperm some other time.” So your body is helping you deal with this chronic stress and must neglect some of the very basic functions required to stay healthy and happy over time.
Chronic stress can weaken your immune system. It can sap your libido, increase your risk of heart disease, exacerbate depression. Generally speaking, it makes your life unpleasant, and possibly shorter.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a one size fits all approach to dealing with stress. Exercise helps, if you like exercise. You have to begin by recognizing that stress is a potentially dangerous problem, and take that seriously. Yoga, mindfulness, exercise, meditation, therapy, massage, walking, engaging in activities that you enjoy, these activities may help you manage your stress. Future posts on this topic will address psychological research on stress, health and coping.
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Dear Dr. Stone, It seems like you’ve been hypnotized by Dr. Sapolsky. When you posted your note on Psychobabble
Sapolsky wrote in his book “Why Zebras don’t Get Ulcers” the same thing you are saying about Selye’s clumsy handling of mice. In the rest of his book Sapolsky wrote a lot of truth and readers have incorporated his statement about Selye as if they were also true. That is practicing hypnosis.
Sapolsky did not repeated Selye.s research by handling the rats the way Selye did, but without giving injections, obtaining the same results as Selye got; that would have been a very good research! But Sapolsky didn’t do that type of double checking that would have supported his statement about Selye. Sapolsky is very good handling baboons, but not rats. Walter B. Cannon did some research in that issue in the 1910s decade.
Cannon threatened animals without giving injections and he found the fight-or-flight reaction. But the fight-or-flight reaction involved the adrenal medulla and Cannon did not report the syndrome discovered by Selye.
Please, “do the math.” Cannon threatened the rats without injections and found the fight-or-flight reaction. Selye threatened the rats giving injections and found the G.A.S. Logical conclusion? The G.A.S. resulted from the injections, not from the threat.
David Fernandez, MD