Note from Kathleen: It seems that everyone I know, myself included, is under great stress right now for a wide variety of reasons. This is an excerpt from my book, 10 Best Ways to Manage Stress.
I hope it will help you recognize the causes and effects of unrelieved stress and offers way to find your way through.
If you’re alive, you’re experiencing stress on a daily basis, perhaps even hourly.
Stress is present in all of our lives. In fact, I venture to say that if you never experience stress, most likely you are
dead.
Everywhere we turn, we are challenged. Stress is our response to challenge. It may be something as simple as a minor annoyance when you slosh coffee on your favorite shirt on your way to work to the day-to-day “excitement” that accompanies challenges with kids, spouses, families, bosses, things that don’t work, the news cycle and a million other things.
Then there are the stressors most of us recognize: financial worries, job loss, illness, divorce, death.
Even the good stuff is stressful: weddings, births, new jobs, new homes.
Yet stress –at least long-term stress—takes its toll.
Fight or flight
Let’s take a brief look at human nature—physical and psychological:
Think of our primitive ancestors. Their lives were centered around survival in the midst of an unfriendly world full of challenges. The hunter encountering a hungry saber-toothed tiger or the cavewoman gathering roots who suddenly disturbed a giant anaconda each instantly developed superhuman powers of combat or escape.
In what is called the “fight or flight” syndrome, when we humans are challenged, we must make an almost instantaneous decision whether to take on the foe or run like hell. Either way, we need to have superior muscle strength at cost of virtually every other physical process.
In times of fight or flight, digestion comes to a screeching halt. Kidney and liver functions slow to near zero. Everything is focused on keeping the organism alive. That means fleeing or fighting.
The stress hormone adrenaline pumps a surge of energy to muscles, increases blood flow to the extremities and engages brain function so that it is so effective that time seems to slow down and complex thought processes can take place in a split second. This explains how a distraught 120-pound mother can lift a two-ton car off her stricken toddler, a feat of strength normally impossible.
Recovery time
Evolution notwithstanding, our ancestors also learned how to turn off the stress and ratchet down those raging stress hormones once the threat had passed. Once the exhausted hunter reached the safety of his cave or the terrified gatherer found refuge at her hearthfire, the most common response would be to take a big drink of water followed by a lengthy period of rest and restoring that innate sense of well-being.
Our ancestors knew how to recover: They took the time to allow the stress response to stop and their bodies to return to normal. The heart rate slowed, digestion and organ function resumes and life was good. They were safe for another day.
Modern day saber-toothed tigers
Now fast forward a few million years to modern times. We are fighting those saber-toothed tigers and giant anacondas day in and day out, years on end, perhaps even for our entire lives.
Of course, these aren’t literal saber-toothed tigers and giant anacondas. Instead, it’s your son’s D in math, your disapproval of your daughter’s new boyfriend, the computer that ate the document you need for a key meeting in 15 minutes, a bounced check, the argument with your spouse, the jacket ruined by the dry cleaner, the neighbor’s dog that insists on using your yard as his toilet, the guy who cut you off in traffic, nagging worries about the health of an aging parent.
It’s life and it’s not easy. None of us can escape it.
But the big problem is that we never turn it off. We don’t give ourselves a chance to recover, even at the end of a long and stressful day.
We go from that meeting with the cantankerous client to the parent-teacher meeting to whining kids clamoring for dinner to baskets of unfolded laundry, permission slips, tears over math homework, news of war, murder, death and destruction on the television, a dinner of fast food because you’re too exhausted to do anything else and getting to bed later than you would like, perhaps lying awake for a couple of hours worrying about an unpaid bill or vague nagging suspicions about your spouse’s fidelity, only to have to get up and start all over again five or six hours later.
Forget about exercise. No time.
Stress hormones and their toll on your health
We never stop to let the stress hormones dissipate and allow our bodies to rest and return to their normal function. We just keep pumping adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol into our systems until our overloaded systems become ill or even shut down completely.
We get fat because the cortisol glut encourages the buildup of belly fat, the most dangerous kind, increasing the risk of Type 2 diabetes and other health problems.
We get heart disease because our overstressed heart muscles can’t hold up under years of pumping harder and faster than necessary because of the elevated stress hormones. Blood pressure rises, increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke. It’s fair enough to assume that the escape into fast food land has also raised your cholesterol.
We get cancer because the constant presence of stress hormones has damaged us all the way to the cellular level, so our cells no longer are able to reproduce and live and die like normal cells, leading to cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and more. No wonder the rate of these dread diseases has skyrocketed!
If you have any of these health problems, your chronic stress has become toxic stress. It is dangerous. It is killing you.
In the coming chapters, you’ll learn ten simple ways to recognize and manage stress. I won’t hedge words: This book will change your life. It may even save your life. Do it and do it now.
