don's report archive

by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.

Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

What IS stress? Hans Selye, credited with being "the father of stress," defined it as, "The nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it." (By the way, who would want to be "the father--or mother or even uncle or aunt of stress, anyway?)

What did Selye mean by "any demand?" In Selye's view "demand" referred to any threat, challenge or change requiring an adaptation by the body. The adaptation or response is automatic and immediate. Although almost everyone thinks of stress as a negative demand or upset, Selye maintained it could be a good thing. He even had a name for "good" stress, "eustress." I suppose it's needless to point out that this term has not exactly caught on. If you doubt it, tell someone you're "full of eustress." Then ask her if she knows what you're talking about!

Basically, Selye intended to convey a simple idea with the words stress and eustress: When events and circumstances lead you to feel upset or sick, it's stress; when such conditions help you perform better, it's eustress.

Given all that, what exactly goes on (in a physiological sense) when stress is experienced? Essentially, your body undergoes a wide range of transformations of a chemical nature. Adrenaline, for instance, shoots into your bloodstream from the adrenal glands. Adrenaline is a stimulant hormone which, in concert with other hormones released during stress, produces bodily changes. These changes include increased heart rate and blood pressure (to get more blood to the muscles, brain and heart), rapid breathing (brings more oxygen), the tensing of muscles (which prepares you for action), raised alertness and sensitivity of sense organs (to assess the situation and act quickly), greater blood flow to the brain, heart and muscles (organs crucial for dealing with the challenge) and less blood to other areas not critical to dealing with a crisis state (your skin, digestive tract, kidneys and liver.) In addition, there is an increase in blood sugar, fats and cholesterol (for extra energy) and a rise in platelets and blood clotting factors (to prevent hemorrhage in case of injury.) All of this is a result of evolutionary adaptations.

These adaptations worked very well through the millennia, but it's 2003 now and the world is a very different place from the Iron Age or earlier when such processes evolved to suit the quite basic needs of early men and women. The world that we know would be unrecognizable to your extraordinarily distant relatives. They had to deal with simpler but more dramatic situations in the Year "Minus One Million" or so. There was plenty to get stressed about in those days. I doubt if anyone privy to what such times were like consider them "the good old days." Furthermore, my guess is that eustress was hard to come by then. Bottom line here: The stress response is designed for two speeds -- fight or flight. Today, people rarely get to do either; instead, stress can build to high levels, particularly in the absence of healthy physical releases. Over time, these blockages will lead to lots of problems, such as very bad health outcomes.

Stress management skills can't make you younger, alter the realities of unwanted changes or change those aspects of modern life that you find more than a little disagreeable; but such skills can make a positive difference in the quality of your remaining days -- and decades. Mastering stress will mitigate many challenges to your serenity and sense of meaning. Applying stress management principles will also buffer against the unsettling fact that the world is increasingly populated by people much younger than you are. There are bright-side alternatives to cursing the darkness, joining a cult, dwelling in a state of semi or full-blown misery or retreating to the comforts of medications, TV or the comic pages. It's never too soon to look for and enjoy such options. Our site has 26 essays on these matters, including commentaries on coping with fear, anxiety, self-control and the like.

Enjoy, be well, and please -- look on the bright side of life.

(Note: This essay will be filed in the archives in the MENTAL DOMAIN under the skill area of stress management. Additional articles related to this theme may be found there.)

(Ed. Note: Views expressed in this and other columns are those of the author and not necessarily those of the SeekWellness Editorial Board.)

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