Somehow, stress remains a nebulous concept. We are encouraged to lower stress levels because of the dangers to our health, but it’s also quite normal to share our symptoms with a doctor and hear him or her say, “Oh, it’s just stress”, implying that it’s not that important—indeed it’s quite normal—to suffer from some stress-related symptoms. After all, we are the stressed species. We are considered to thrive under competition and pressure. We live in a society where “business” actually means “busy-ness”. The more drained we are, the better. In some circles, stress has become a kind of measurement of status, and enduring large quantities of stress is a reliable indicator of the potential success you are going to achieve in life.
Whether you are a top manager in your specific industry or a stay-at-home mom with your kids, stress seems to be the price to pay to keep up with the demands of life.
The culture of stress is coming to terms with the biology of stress.
The dichotomy between the scientific motto “stress is bad” and the social acceptance of stress as the formula for productivity and success (or as an ineluctable part of modern society) is very confusing for the person who ultimately just wants to figure out how to live well.
Despite cultural changes, our biological systems have not changed the way they handle stress. After all, the few thousands of years that culminated in our culture are a mere speck on the long timeline that encompasses the existence of our species. This means that our nervous, hormonal, and immune responses cannot support today’s chronically stressful lifestyle.
We say we are stressed on the eve of an exam, when we can’t get our kids to listen to us, when the boss asks us to complete an impossible task. We say we are stressed when we feel trapped in a job we don’t like. We say we are stressed when we cry as soon as we get home, exhausted, after the umpteenth day of a long commute, or when we feel not understood by a partner or a friend.
Stress seems to be a normal part of our regular life. And, surely, it has become so. But, what exactly is stress?
Stress = stressor + response. It’s the emotional and physical reaction to a threat.
When we talk about stress, we are usually referring to the psychological and emotional adaptation to difficulty and to its negative consequences to our health. In fact, stress is not just mental, but also physical.
The brain is the organ that decides what is potentially stressful and how it will handle the stress response. The type of interpretation and the severity of the response differ among individuals, and they largely depend on previous life experiences. The effects of the stress response on human health rest at the intersection of individual life history, genetic variations, and lifestyle.
Stress is not limited to major life events; instead, it’s become a constant of life. This happens because everyone can have a different interpretation of what is considered a threat. Stressors differ among people, and the majority of our stress-related issues stem from an inappropriate interpretation of these stressors. This causes a non-specific stress response. In a sense, our definition of ‘threat’ is already a response.
I’ve been reading the scientific literature on stress for many years, and I’ve never come across the same definition twice. Sometimes the term is used to describe the stressor (the trigger), sometimes the response, and other times the consequences of the response. If we put all those elements together, what emerges is that ‘stress’ is a state of both mind and body that arises when the presence of a perceived threat is coupled with a response. Simply put, stress is the psychological and physical response to a real or imaginary threat.
Because it seems that we suffer the most from our perception of challenges, and from the consequences of an inappropriate stress response, I think that the best way to define stress is by virtue of the type of response we can activate.
In other words, the stress we suffer from is not so much about what happens to us, but, rather, about the way we react to what happens to us.
Stress is an adaptive response.
Stress is the physiological and emotional reaction to a challenge. It’s not a disease by itself. It is a complex adaptive response that depends on our individual characteristics and that has the evolutionary goal of protecting us.
Our evolutionary heritage has equipped us, both biologically and psychologically, to react when the environment is demanding. In this sense, stress is meant to be part of life—the stress response is a way to move through challenging times.
So, evolution equipped us to use this response in the presence of life-threatening events. With the growing complexity of human life and societies, the types of threats have changed, but the response has stayed the same. However, we use it more frequently (unfortunately, also when it’s not truly needed) and without proper recovery time. That doesn’t mean that the stress response is standard for everyone: Different people will react in a different way to the same difficulty. In other words, everyone perceives a given situation in a subjective manner, and that almost never has to do with the actual struggle, but, instead, with the way we faced the same type of struggle in the past.
The subjective dimension of stress is an inner event, an intimate experience that tells pieces of an individual’s life story.
A few days ago, my husband read about the suicide of a 22-year-old. He asked me, “Why should such young people consider life unbearable? What might have happened to this girl to take her to that point?” And I replied, “She went through childhood and I guess that was enough for her” –implying that childhood too often means ‘pain’ and not ‘play’ for many people, even in the absence of major traumatic events.
Our stress doesn’t begin with school exams, mortgages, or parenthood. Stress begins at birth—if not during prenatal life.
Childhood and adolescence can be the most significant stressors we undergo in life, because whatever happens during our formative years is more likely to leave a permanent trace in our life history. Early memories of struggles and challenges are going to resurface during the rest of our lives in both our mental and visceral dimensions—and they will elicit the type of stress response we associated with them.
Stress is related to the shaping of the personality and to the development of an individual’s emotional style.
From an objective perspective, the stress response unfolds with a series of bodily changes that are pretty much the same for everyone, but when we consider the mental and emotional aspects—which are subjective—stress becomes a sense of strain and tension within ourselves and is not necessarily proportional to the actual problem.
Often, stress is present even without any trigger other than the individual’s own thoughts and sensations linked to past memories. This is possible because our brain has a predictive nature and foresees dangers and difficulties based on past negative experiences. If someone has formed a negative concept of the world, she will be more vulnerable to stressors.
Conversely, there are people more resistant to stress, who face challenges with confidence. They usually have a positive mindset; they do not think that everything is always ok, but rather that a problem won’t last forever and it’s not the end of the world. They don’t foresee disasters all the time. They are less prone to interpret unpleasant life situations as threats, and, compared to someone living inside a constant trigger, they can detach more from problems.
Stress is a personal response, and the quality of that response influences the quality of our lives as well.
Our type of response to challenges makes us more or less vulnerable to mental and physical diseases. However, the subjective dimension of stress has a positive meaning, too. If stress is a personal adaptation, it can be considered an active response. In other words, stress doesn’t happen to us, leaving us powerless or doomed; instead, we have the ability to control it—even when it’s not immediate or easy.
From a biological angle, the intrinsic potential to change and improve our type of response stays with us forever. If we recognize that our stress response works against us, rather than for us, we can learn how to change it. This will have a positive effect on our general well-being, making us feel more deliberate in taking care of ourselves.
Improving the stress response also has positive effects on health. In fact, from a bodily perspective, stress is the way our biology deals with life. By diminishing the reactivity to life stressors, we have the ability to improve our health.
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23045648
