Blood Stream | Managing Stress Tips | Dealing With Stress

Stress Hormones 10000 years ago and today

August 6th, 2008 |

Author: admin

Imagine that you live in a cave - no running water, no electricity. It is just you, your family group, the fire that you constantly have to keep burning and the sabre-tooth tigers outside, prowling and waiting to pounce if you go out alone.

Every day you have to scrounge for food, go and hunt down that bison, kill it, skin it, cut up the meat, haul it back to the cave. And if you don’t do the same thing tomorrow, you and your family might very well starve to death soon.

Sounds stressful?
Strangely enough, it was probably much less stressful than our modern lives. The problem was that the human body was engineered to bring up a fight or flight response to situations such as those experienced by the cave dweller. The central nervous system would cook up a cocktail of hormones and release these into the blood stream in the matter of seconds. These hormones would basically consist of a combination of adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol. These hormones enable your body to go into an enhanced state of arousal to enable it to deal with the sabre-tooth tiger as well as hunting the bison.

Now, this is very important. After the hunter has killed the bison, or evaded the tiger, the brain realizes that the source of the threat has been removed and it switches back to a state of relaxation. The hormones that have been released into the blood stream are ‘used up’ through the activity of fight or flight that caused them to be released in the first place.

The stress reaction is not as direct and immediate as the fight-or-flight reaction, but the central nervous system releases the same hormones into the blood stream and to the organs, but the effect is slower and longer term. The problem with our modern life is that we seem to be more and more in a state of stress-induced arousal and less and less in a state where we return to relaxation, since we do not have an outlet to get rid of those hormones in our blood. We cannot thump the girl behind the airline counter who told us that the flight has been delayed, we cannot tell the irritating and demanding customer to go stuff himself since our livelihoods and our jobs depend on us being polite. So in effect, those hormones have nowhere to go and slosh around in our bloodstream forever, so to speak, building up and building up and eventually causing stress-related illnesses and conditions.

In effect, we have unlearned how to relax!