Stressed to Excess

What is Stress?

Simply put, when we adapt to change, we experience stress. The more change, the more stress we feel. However, not all stress is bad. Stress that's bad for us is called distress; the good kind is called eustress.

According to renowned biologist and researcher Hans Selye, stress is the non-specific response by the body to any demand made upon it. In other words, stress is our physiological, psychological and behavioral responses to events that challenge or threaten us.

Dr. Selye coined the term "fight or flight response" to describe how every living thing, from cells to humans, responds when threatened or challenged. For all our complexity, we automatically respond with one of two options:

We fight.

Or we run.

Our ancestors relied on this innate mechanism for survival, and we are living proof of its efficacy. Today, however, most of us do not need to hunt for food or escape from wild animals. Yet our bodies respond to modern challenges, like impossibly busy schedules, climbing the corporate ladder, financial pressures and relationship challenges, as if they are actually threats of physical harm.

Under stress, we respond internally and automatically with the impetus to fight or run, neither of which are appropriate options to modern pressures. This puts us in a perpetual state of "readiness" that weakens us over time, burdening our immune system and damaging our efforts to be healthy and optimistic in today's demanding world.

To make matters worse, this automatic fight or flight response was meant for only short periods of time. Any longer than a few minutes and the adrenaline rush, the racing heart, the sudden shift in the circulatory system away from the extremities and deep into the muscles, the constriction in the breath – once life-saving evolutionary benefits – begin damaging the brain, heart, arteries, muscles, skin, appetite, emotions, moods and relationships...in short, our capacity for optimism and joy.

Why You Don't Know How Stressed You Are When you encounter situations or people that threaten or challenge you, a change occurs in your brain chemistry that favors quick thinking over rationality. This same response dampens your body-sense. These are both remnants of that adaptive fight or flight mechanism that served our predecessors living in the wild. Today, they can cause serious health disorders and disease.

When stressed, without even knowing it, you move unconsciously and continuously into a state of readiness (for the "attack" that never happens) that prevents you from noticing the stress and strain you are under.

Your conscious mind denies the effects of stress and relies on the powerful subconscious mind to defend against the onslaught of imagined physical harm. It therefore sabotages any real progress toward deep and skillful relaxation, as this seems dangerous to a mind under perceived threat.

Ironically, you find yourself fighting against your own self-defense mechanism. And there's no way to win the battle until you retrain yourself to respond differently to those things that challenge or threaten you.

Retraining yourself does not require a change in external circumstances. It just means that you must alter how the external situation affects your inner world of thoughts and feelings, since these directly affect your physical body and health.

You Are Right: Stress is Increasing!

Even though the effects of stress are well documented...see Reuters Health...most people will ignore danger signs until their bodies scream for attention. This becomes a slippery slope as stress builds, your health deteriorates, and your capacity for joy is weakened.

What if change and the resultant stress were to get even worse than it is today. Is this even possible?

A survey was performed about 20 years ago to address this question. Its purpose was to gauge how stress increased in the prior 100 years. Before you read highlights of that study, be sure you're sitting down. The results are shocking--almost unbelievable.

You have over one thousand times the number of stressors each day that your great grandfather had.

You experience over 300,000 individual stressors daily that your body processes unconsciously.

Only ten percent of those stressors are psychological or social; the rest are physical, chemical, and electromagnetic.

There are 500,000 synthetic chemicals in our environment that didn't even exist 100 years ago, that permeate our food supply, water and the air inside and outside our homes.

There are over 200,000 electromagnetic frequencies in our environment that didn't exist in nature 100 years ago.

And this survey was conducted twenty years ago; today our bodies have even more stress to contend with.

Combining stressors like chemical pesticides, electromagnetic smog, impossibly busy schedules, a demanding job, family obligations, and accelerating change creates a cascade of physiological responses that will lead to disease if not properly removed or discharged.

It is undeniable that stress levels are increasing at a phenomenal rate. The important point is this: As the frequency of change increases, so does the potential for unhealthy stress.

In other words, increasing change equals increasing stress.

We need another option besides the fight or flight response to deal with challenge, threat and change. This is the purpose of Joseph's Thriving Under Stress programs: to give you the tools to positively recondition how you respond to people or situations that challenge or threaten you...leading to personal optimization and poise under any circumstance.



Stressed to Excess - To learn more about this author, visit Joseph Giove's Website.

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