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Stress
Stop the world, I want
to get off! -
When we think of what affects
our emotional well-being, the first concept that probably comes to mind is stress. Stress
is a very complex subject. The word itself is one of the most misused in the English
language, both in every day life and the medical field. It’s correctly used as a
noun, a verb, and an adjective. But of all of its uses, its accepted definition in society
is also its most inaccurate.
The word ‘stress’ has come
to carry a solely negative connotation, yet it is important to realize that stress is an
intrinsic component of good health. Stress is actually the stimulus that enables growth
and development to occur. Consider this: inhalation, the act of expanding the lungs, is a
stressor. This act of stress upon the lungs is then balanced by the recovery of
exhalation. Now, if you breathe in and hold that breath, your body soon screams for its
natural balance to be restored. It is not stress itself that is the culprit. It’s the
lack of recovery from the stressors bombarding us which create havoc in our emotional and
physical well-being. But through your ability to use and manipulate your emotions, you can
take control of your physical and mental well-being.
Stress does create physiological changes, many of
which are actually triggered by emotional reactions to the stressor. Stress is something
to actively seek out, because as long as it’s balanced by an equal amount of
recovery, your body and emotions are trained to withstand the stress without experiencing
injury.
This probably sounds contradictory to what
we’ve come to believe, since we are constantly told that stress should be avoided at
all costs or at least reduced as much as is humanly possible. But this is absolutely
wrong. Just think of what happens to a broken leg - it’s encased in a cast to protect
it from all stress. Yes, this allows the bone to heal, but what happens to the immobilized
muscles during that healing process? Exposed to no movement - no stress - they lose
resiliency and, after the cast is removed, require progressive retraining through physical
therapy before they can withstand even normal use. If you were to eliminate all stress
from your existence, you would soon lose all emotional states - there would be no joy, no
anguish, no exuberance, no grief. Technically, if all stress were eliminated, you would
not even inhale and exhale. What would you be? Dead.
What we must realize is that it is not stress itself
which causes our problems - it is the inappropriate responses to the stressors which
ultimately lead to harm. By training ourselves to recognize imbalance between stress and
recovery, we grasp the ability to recognize the imbalance created in our emotional and
physical states. And through the use of emotion, we literally can alter our body’s
physical response to the stressors we encounter.
While everybody manifests a stress response, it may
vary from one individual to another. When confronted with a major stressor, some people
may experience a rapid increase in heart rate. In others, the stomach feels as though it
is twisted in knots, with a major impact on the gastrointestinal system. Yet others might
experience tension headaches, caused by muscle tension. Although all of these symptoms
have an actual tendency to occur, different individuals may have a predominance of one
type of symptom or another. And it is noteworthy that the form of response will manifest
in other types of situations as well.
There are different forms of stress - in particular,
acute versus chronic. Acute stress is what happens within you when you’re suddenly
cut off on the highway by a huge truck or when you climb aboard a roller-coaster for the
first time. Your mental resources and physical body are actually very adept at dealing
with this short-lived type of stress. What the mind and body are not equipped to handle is
chronic stress. That’s because the response to stressors results in a switch from
unessential building processes to the process of breaking things down.
Chemicals are produced within your body during the
stress period as a response which enables the conversion of energy into a useable form.
One of the chemicals involved in this process is cortisol, and one of its main missions is
to fuel the ‘fight or flight’ response. This provides you with the energy needed
to get yourself out of a mess. But if the stress is chronic - if you cannot remove
yourself from the stressful situation - the continual release of cortisol begins to take a
severe toll on the immune, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems.
Mental health may also suffer and, because it takes
energy to mobilize resources within your body during the stress response period, lethargy
may set in when those sources of energy become depleted.
Stress is not the cause of problems in our lives - inappropriate
response to the stressor is.
For well-being and growth,
stress must be balanced by recovery.
Acute stress induces
protective responses, while chronic stress leads to impairment.
©Dr. Nick Hall.1998-2005 |
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Personality
You’ve got personality
Perception is first and foremost
among the factors that can impact upon the stress response. No two people will necessarily
perceive an event in exactly the same way. This doesn’t mean that you are wrong and
the other person is right. It’s simply that different people use different sources of
information to draw a conclusion.
So it is that some people drive to the airport and
look forward to climbing aboard a perfectly functional airplane and then jumping out of it
at 10,000 feet with their skydiving club. For them this is emotional excitement. Another
person though, one with a phobia of flying, goes to the same airport, encounters the same
sounds and the same sights but, instead of anticipating emotional excitement, experiences
abject terror. As long as an event or activity falls within our safety envelope, as
it’s sometimes called, chances are the event will be perceived as excitement. The
moment the envelope is breached, the same event becomes a source of anxiety.
We all have a need for a certain amount of emotional
excitement. The threshold is dictated largely by our genetic blueprint and also is
influenced by experiences early in our lives. There may be in your collective experience
certain features associated with an event that serves as an immediate trigger of emotion
without the need to interpret additional information about the event. This enables you to
perceive an emergency and respond immediately on the basis of incomplete information,
rather than to delay a response while awaiting the higher processing that would occur
elsewhere in the brain.
For example, if you’re in the Rocky mountains
and encounter a large grizzly bear, you don’t want to stand there contemplating
whether or not the bear might have escaped from the circus, if perhaps it’s friendly,
whether it will move away or if you should turn and run, and whether the best route would
be uphill or down, to the north or the south. By the time you make up your mind about all
these questions, you’ve assumed your position in the food chain. Instead, your body
should demand immediate escape. The questions can be considered later.
Coping style is important as well, and there are
three general ways in which people respond to events that might elicit an emotional
consequence. First is the person who responds to the slightest aggravation or
inconvenience with a huge anxiety response and, when they fill out psychological
questionnaires, admit that they are high-anxious. Then there are people who are just the
opposite. You practically have to light a stick of dynamite under them to get any response
at all. These people are known as ‘low-anxiety,’ and identify themselves as such
when they complete psychological questionnaires. But there’s a third group, which is
made up of people who are most at risk for health related problems. These are people
labeled as ‘repressors.’ Physiologically, they respond with a robust anxiety
response and appear to be identical to those labeled as high-anxious. But when asked to
describe themselves, they claim to be low-anxious. In other words, their perceptions of
themselves do not match what is happening in their bodies. These are people who,
incidentally, are more prone to certain types of tumors as well as to opportunistic
infections.
Personality is a very important variable that has a
profound influence on your emotional well-being and health. The media has long discussed
the Type-A personality - this is someone who speaks at a very rapid rate and often
finishes your sentences out of impatience. It’s this person who’s constantly
checking his watch, never takes time to smell the roses and often feels guilty about going
on vacation. When the data that identified this personality type were first analyzed, it
was concluded that Type-A’s were predisposed to develop coronary arterial disease.
But later research revealed it was hostility, not time orientation, that was the major
contributing risk factor. There is now compelling data to suggest that a Type-H, or
hostility personality should be designated. These individuals are impatient, aggressive,
angry and competitive. In short, they are heart attacks waiting to strike.
Other personality types have been identified also.
The Type-B person is basically a non-Type-A. They get their jobs done but aren’t
slaves to the clock. They speak and move at a normal pace and enjoy going on holiday. Then
there is the Type-C or cancer prone personality. These people will endure a great deal of
personal discomfort in order to please others, and will frequently say yes when they
really want to say no. Type-C women are at high risk for breast cancer, and Type-C men are
more likely to develop cancer of the prostate gland. Both men and women Type-C’s also
are more susceptible to rheumatoid arthritis.
Ironically, it’s the Type-C personality
who’s the favored patient of many health care providers. These people are extremely
compliant and seldom complain. They’ll wait until their throat is parched before
ringing for a glass of water, and then apologize for bothering the nurse who brings it.
They’ll never complain about being awakened at 2 a.m. to be given a sleeping pill or
have their temperature taken. Type-C’s are in direct contrast to the person
who’s constantly asking questions and demanding information about their medications
and treatments. Yet it’s these individuals, considered ‘difficult to
manage,’ who are most likely to survive. The person who’s asking questions and
being assertive is acting like a healthy person, while the compliant one is acting like a
victim. And oddly enough, it’s the Type-C person who takes an excessive toll on the
health care system, requiring unnecessary medical protocols and hospitalization up to
twice as long as the more independent patients.
There’s one more personality to mention briefly
- the so-called Type-T or thrill seeking personality. These are the people whose idea of
fun is to jump off a cliff attached to a bungee cord or who plan their vacations around
the newest white-water rafting course they’ve heard about. They have a very high
threshold for stress and need to engage in extraordinarily risky behavior to satisfy their
need for emotional excitement. Obviously, they have a decreased life expectancy due to the
risks they take, but research has not defined a susceptibility to certain types of
diseases linked to their need for thrill. Type-T’s are extremely valuable to society,
in that they are the ones who explore uncharted frontiers and often make key discoveries.
Now that we’ve defined these four personality
types, here’s something very important to understand: no one is solely one
personality type. Each of us is actually a composite of them all. You might be a Type-A
personality in the workplace, but a Type-B personality around your family, or a Type-T on
vacation who melts into a Type-C the minute you step into the doctor’s office or
hospital. While it is valid to designate personality types, there are potential pitfalls
in assigning a label to someone which may actually apply only under unique circumstances.
What
is stressful for one person may be exciting to another.
Our personalities can vary under
different circumstances.
Repressing emotion can
lead to a high risk for health related problems.
©Dr. Nick Hall.1998-2005 |
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Helplessness
Helpless, helpless,
helpless, helpless -
Chronic stress, whether it be dealing with an
impossible boss, the illness of a loved one, or continual worry over paying the bills, can
have a serious effect upon both the mind and the body’s ability to withstand the
stress. Often, as a result of such unrelenting pressure, we lose our ability to respond
and slip into a sense of hopelessness and helplessness.
The role of helplessness has been repeatedly
demonstrated in laboratory situations using sophisticated experimentation. Of particular
relevance to emotion is a study conducted several decades ago by researchers at Yale
University who studied rats in two separate cages. Through both cage floors passed a very
mild electrical current. Each animal was exposed to the same stressor, and each cage had a
bar the rats could press. In every way, the cages and the rats’ lifestyles were
identical - except one. The only difference was that in one cage, depressing the bar
turned off the electrical current to both cages; in the other, depressing the bar had no
effect whatsoever. The rat in that cage could press the bar as much as it wanted but
nothing would happen. So the only difference was that in a stressful situation, one animal
was given an element of control, while the other had none. The rats who had no control
soon developed impaired immunity and an increased susceptibility to tumors. In other
words, it wasn’t the stressor that caused the problem - the stressor was the same for
all the rats. Instead, it was the lack of control.
This example shows why it’s so important to do
something - anything - when faced with adversity. Even if the probability of a positive
outcome is remote, that fact is less important than the actual act of attempting to do
something to remedy the situation. By perceiving that nothing can be done, and by doing
nothing at all, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of victimization. The feeling of
being helpless is actually exacerbated by acting helpless.
Unrelenting
chronic stress can result in an emotional sense of helplessness.
Helplessness can lead to physical and mental
degeneration.
Any activity against the chronic stressor reduces the
opportunity for helplessness to become overwhelming.
©Dr. Nick Hall.1998-2005 |
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Exercise
I could
have spread my wings and done a thousand things -
Most people know how to
experience stress. That’s not the problem. The problem is very few of us know how to
adequately respond to the stressful situation. As odd as it may sound, it is actually
possible to train your body to withstand stress. And when your body is trained to
experience and recover from stress, the cells are able to properly respond to the chemical
changes induced as a result of the stressor.
As we now know, it isn’t stress that causes
health related problems, but the sense of helplessness we experience in response to the
stressor. Every cell within the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system and even the
immune system has the ability to train itself to withstand stress. It is well documented
that if the concentration of a chemical increases within the body, there will be a
corresponding adjustment in the ability of the receptor to attract the chemical. It’s
one of the ways the body adapts to change. By bathing the body’s cells in stress
hormones during their episodic release, the cells learn to recover, and when a major
stressor arises, these cells are better able to adapt.
The very best form of stress to seek out is
exercise. Exercise itself is a form of stress, but is not harmful because it is under your
control. You are not helpless while working out. And too few people get enough of this
beneficial form of stress. Some studies suggest that the average person spends two and a
half hours a day watching television, yet only 15 minutes per day exercising. Many people
get no exercise at all.
Never in the course of history have people been more
inactive, and never have we been more susceptible to so many diseases. Physical activity
of any kind will help protect you against coronary arterial disease, colon cancer, breast
cancer and, without question, obesity. The avoidance of severe depression could be, in
part, explained by the fact that people who exercise on a regular basis experience the
release of beta-endorphin, not only at the end of the exercise period but in some
instances during the exercise as well.
During exercise a number of neurochemical and
hormonal changes take place. Exercise-induced beta-endorphin release is one of the reasons
why people feel good after completing either a formal regimen of exercise or perhaps less
formal, such as shoveling snow or mowing the lawn. This feeling of well-being is partly
because the exercise is over and you know you don’t have to do it anymore, but
it’s also due to the release of endorphins, the body’s own morphine, following
the exercise. Highly trained athletes are actually able to experience the release of
endorphins during their workouts, and some individuals have concluded this is what
accounts for the phenomenon known as ‘runner’s high.’ When these dedicated
athletes are forced to stop all exercise, they often experience withdrawal symptoms that
may be related to the lack of release of the endorphins upon which they have come to
depend.
The exercise regimen most people are familiar with
is called ‘steady state aerobic.’ The average person will exercise for a period
of 30 minutes or will run exactly five miles and then stop. There’s no question this
will improve your cardiovascular fitness. But it has very little benefit from the
standpoint of training your body to deal with stress. And the reason is that, while you
are getting 30 minutes of continuous aerobic exercise, your body experiences only one
recovery period - at the end. A more beneficial exercise regimen is structured to raise
and lower your heart rate continuously throughout the exercise, thereby creating cycles of
stress and recovery during the activity.
Virtually any type of exercise done wherever is
convenient will suffice to create these waves of energy expenditure followed by recovery.
Start by exercising about 5 to 10 minutes 3 times a day. Then as you build more endurance,
work up to 8 to 12 minutes twice a day. There are no precise rules but, in general, as you
are exercising, you should feel as though you are working hard without being pushed to the
point where the effort can’t be kept up for more than a few minutes.
Following this regimen, your endurance will actually
improve. So will your endurance for dealing with stress. The cells in your body are being
bathed in relatively large amounts of the same stress hormones produced under
circumstances where you might not have any control. By causing this to occur on your
terms, you are training your body to deal with stress and, at the same time, increasing
its elasticity and the range within which it can optimally operate.
Physical exercise is a beneficial form of stress.
Exercise trains your
body to recover from stress.
Exercise causes chemical and
hormonal changes that have a positive impact on our emotions
©Dr.
Nick Hall.1998-2005 |
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| Anger
Fussin’
and fightin’ -
There are some interesting differences between men
and women with respect to the expression of emotions, especially anger. Both get angry
with about the same frequency - usually six or seven times a week, and the reasons behind
the anger and its intensity are about the same. The differences lie in the manner in which
anger is expressed.
Men are more inclined to shout and pound their
fists. Women are more likely to cry or keep their anger to themselves. Also, women are
more likely to express their anger to someone who is not the actual source of the anger.
And the greater the intensity of anger within the woman, the longer it takes her to
recover. This isn’t so with men. The bottom line, though, is that regardless of how
anger is expressed, the toll this emotion takes on the heart is the same.
Emotional reactions can be retrained. When you find
yourself becoming angry, follow Dr. Williams’ advice and then ask yourself these
three questions.
- Is this really worth getting
worked up over?
- Is my anger
justified?
- Will venting my
anger change anything?
If you answer yes to all three of these questions,
ask yourself one more: Is this the appropriate time and place to express my anger? If that
answer is also yes, go ahead with your angry outburst. Even Aristotle, who pretty much
wrote the book on anger as an emotion, recognized that expressing it under the appropriate
circumstances was the healthy thing to do.
But if even one answer is no, then chill out.
Actually, you will already have started to do so. By pausing long enough to ask yourself
those questions, you took the first critical step in taking the emotional edge off the
situation.
Inappropriate expression of anger is emotionally harmful, while
justifiable anger can be beneficial.
Anger unleashes chemical changes that place stress on the
coronary system.
The number and type of situations
that cause us to feel angry can indicate our risk for coronary disease.
We can train ourselves to respond to situations with emotional
responses other than anger.
©Dr. Nick Hall.1998-2005 |
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| DR. NICK HALL, Ph.D., Hon.
M.D., is an internationally recognized psycho-neuro-immunologist who has
conducted pioneering research concerning the interrelationships between
the emotions and health. His research career has been as diverse as his
life experiences.
Dr. Hall has been the recipient of two prestigious Research Scientist
Development Awards, which the National Institutes of Health grants only to
the top scientists in the U.S. He has appeared on numerous television
programs, such as CBS "60 Minutes," the BBC "Nova" series, and the Emmy
Award winning series "Healing and the Mind" produced by Bill Moyers for
PBS. His most recent television appearances include BBC's "Horizon" series
and WUSF TV 16's "Science Adventures."
He has published over 150 research articles and book chapters, and was
senior editor of the highly acclaimed book "Mind Body Interactions and
Disease" which was commissioned by the National Institutes of Health. In
April 1997, he received an Honorary M.D. at Lincoln Center, New York,
among the most distinguished scientists in the U.S. He is the Director of
the Institute for Health and Human Performance, and is an adjunct
Professor of Biochemistry at the George Washington University School of
Medicine in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Hall's company is based in Tampa, FL at Saddlebrook Resort.
Executives, athletes and performers utilize his research on THE EFFECT OF
STRESS ON THE IMMUNE SYSTEM. Dr. Hall is available to provide educational services and consulting on
the topics of:
- Stress & Conflict Management
- Emergency Health Management
- Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome Management
- Occupational Health
- CEU courses for Healthcare Providers
- Life-transition Management
- Effective Presentation Skills for Doctors, Nurses and Scientists
- Scientific Research Fundraising
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