An Incredibly Brief History of Stress

Just In Time for Christmas

I Got That Feeling

We all know when we feel stressed. Or do we? It's funny, I have taught classes all over the world about the management of stress for performance and for life all and when I ask people to define stress for me the answers I get rarely define the term. In fact for the longest time I didn’t really know either. I'll challenge you before you go on reading to STOP right here and think about your definition. If you want to go as far as writing it down before you read the rest. I'll wait.

If you're anything like most of us what you came up with answers that fit into one of two categories. The first, situations or events that cause feelings of stress. Commonly reported are finances, marriage or divorce, death, workplace, and family. Behind door number two we have synonyms for or descriptors of the feeling of stress. Words like anxious, tense, nauseous, and fatigued are often on this list. All of these are correct if the question is how do you experience stress. But they don't get us any closer to the fundamental reality of what stress really is.

More clearly defining terms affords us two important opportunities. First, if we have a more clear definition we can do a better job of increasing our awareness of what things truly stress us without the limitation of our own point of view. Second, the strategies we use to deal with our stress can transform us from mere managers of our stress into stress engineers that proactively engage with the demands of life in a way that allows us to adapt positively to them.

Everybody Hurts

The term "stress" as we know it was not part of the medical nomenclature until about a century ago and not a part of popular culture speech until much later still. Originally and to this day stress is a term used in physics and engineering as a "measure of force acting on a material". The stress tolerance of a material is the amount of force it can take before it deforms or breaks. That’s a good start for sure. Dr. Hans Selye the father of all stress medicine began to utilize this term to describe human physiological reactions to systemic disruptions regardless of their cause. Dr. Selye noticed in his practice that deep beneath all disruptors of health whether through blatant disease or injury, or less obvious causes of psychological malaise there was a unifying adaptive response to this "stress".

This mechanism, which Selye called the General Adaptation Syndrome, is the response of the body to maintain its normal bandwidth of homeostasis. Homeostasis is the sum total of values that set the conditions for our continued function and adaptability as an organism. The deep biology of our Autonomic Nervous System is responsible for maintaining the tight bandwidth of chemistry that keeps us alive. Stress then is any thing that perturbs this bandwidth of normal function. That includes things we might think of as negative such as unexpected financial strain but can also include things we deem as positive like the preparation for and execution of a holiday party in our home.

It's delightful to revel in the change of seasons with loved ones but staying up late, eating goodies, and other festive alterations in our normal habits are collectively disruptive to our normal homeostasis. We humans aren't so fragile that one little Hannukah party will set us back for years. Over the course of time however stressors can stack up and the proverbial well can run dry. This brings us to another important term for understanding stress - allostasis. Allostasis is maintaining physiological stability through change. In other words as stressors come in our ability to respond to the demand of that stressor, return to normal, and be more fit to meet that demand again in the future is allostasis. The cumulative cost of this process is allostatic load.

The hormonal and neurological mechanisms designed to deal with stress from the environment are best used for short term warfare. Sustained activity of these biological protections can be severely damaging over the long haul. One easy example of this is high blood pressure. The ability to raise blood pressure in response to acute physiological demand is the sign of a health body but high blood pressure sustained over months and years is deleterious our cardiovascular health and a known precursor to heart attack.

That's why Harvard researcher and author Dr. Herbert Benson sought out non-pharmaceutical aids to lower blood pressure in the 1970s. He realized early on that the struggle with high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease could be combated with tools and techniques that reduced the downside of stress from the inside out. I highly recommend his classic book The Relaxation Response if you want to read more on that topic.

Why is all of this important? If we truly understand what constitutes the real costs of stress to our health we can be far more conscious of when and where we spend money. Not to mention knowing that both insidious and unforseen costs will show up (usually when it is terribly inconvenient) and that if we don't want to go broke we'd better save up for a rainy day. The point at which the outflow of energy to rebound from cumulative stress outmatches the available resources for allostasis we hit allostatic overload aka going broke. This can manifest as a feeling of burnout, fatigue, pain, or even disease.

Stressed Out

As I write this article it's just a few days away from Christmas. The holidays can be a time filled with joy and togetherness but they can also represent times of stress. This is a great example of just what an odd cocktail of stress that our routines, emotions, and physical bodies are. Often when we get overloaded or stressed out it feels like something that happens to us like a housefly landing on our shoulder. But it's not.

As a gym owner I would watch year after year as known times of increased stress would come and clients would make no consideration whatsoever in the organization of their stress and its compliments -rest and recovery. We often act as if the various origins of stress bucket them into categories that don't effect one another. But in the deepest truth of the body all water gets drawn from the same well.

Often by the time we get smacked by the lagging indicator of stress and allostatic overload we are having a full on Chevy Chase, National Lampoon Christmas Vacation style meltdown in our living room on Christmas while our entire family watches. How many signals did we have before this moment? How many opportunities to change course? It's hard to say but one thing is for sure - having the capability to legitimately tally the cost of stress and act appropriately can be a powerful skill to have to navigate a life well-lived.

Head Above Water

Now that you have a better understanding of exactly what stress is it's going to be far easier to organize yourself accordingly. Pay attention to and measure real markers of stress like heart rate, blood pressure, and sleep. Check in and be honest about the costs of life at the moment. If you're having trouble putting it all together, get help.

Forming a more conscious connection with what stress is and how it truly effects you can help you be a more effective agent on behalf of your own health. In doing so you will have increased opportunities to prepare yourself when possible and accommodate when necessary. Or if neither of those is an option, to minimally temper your expectations so you can get the most return on investment where it matters the most in your life.

Stress is here to stay. It's neither good nor bad. It's simply a fact of existence. We need some stress too. When well-applied it can be a source for growth and strength. Just know that while making 9,000 Christmas cookies and awesome holiday parties and late nights with friends and family might not seem stressful unto themselves. Deep, deep down in your body the well has a little less water.

Merry Christmas and thanks for reading,

Rob