Posts Tagged ‘human body’
Stress Hormones 10000 years ago and today
August 6th, 2008 | 
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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!
Tags: blood stream, cave dweller, central nervous system, family group, flight reaction, flight response, hormones, human body, noradrenaline, relaxation, running water, stress reactionRelated posts
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Stress - The Modern Disease
Stress is often called a modern disease since it seems as if it is a disease or malady particularly applicable to today’s lifestyle.
One needs to question whether people in older times also were not subjected to stress. After all, a few years ago people did not have access to the level of modern medicine that we have today and illnesses such as Tuberculosis and further back, other illnesses such as plagues, caused great hardship, death and surely stress? Similarly, people had much less access to physical comforts (indoor plumbing comes to mind…) and the world also went through various major wars. Surely that should have contributed to stress for people living in those times?
The biggest difference between those times and today though is that up to the beginning of the last century people tended to live quite physically active lives – the majority of people tended to work at physical labor, and the lifestyle in general was more physical (no TV!). This tended to alleviate the physical symptoms of stress.
What I mean by that is that stress has a large physical component to it. The human body has been engineered to react physically to danger – the so-called ‘fight or flight’ reaction. This reaction is brought about by the central nervous system and is not something that we have any conscious control over – much like breathing! The reaction prepares us physically to react to dangerous situations by making sure that we have more adrenalin in our bloodstream so that we can run or fight, our heart would beat faster, our muscles would fill with blood, we would start to breath faster.
Stress reactions are also controlled by the central nervous system, and although not as extreme as the fight-or-flight reaction, it has a more insidious effect since our modern life-style does not permit a physical reaction to the stressor – you can hardly punch your boss in the face if he irritates you!
This means that while there are a lot of stressors that could cause physical stress reactions – much the same type of physical reactions as the one brought about by the fight-or-flight reaction just to a lesser degree, the problem is that our bodies have much less of a physical outlet to get rid of these effects. We have much more sedentary life-styles than in previous years. The physical effects of these stressors (factors which cause us stress) therefore build up in our bodies and eventually manifest themselves over the long term in the form of physical and mental ailments – heart disease, digestive problems, tension headaches, insomnia, loss of weight, susceptibility to colds and flu and a general weak immune system.
But without stress, on the other hand, life would be extremely boring! We need a certain amount of stress in our lives in order to function properly. Stress is what makes us perform at our best, stress adds spice to life! It is how we each individually react to stressors that make the difference. Stress can therefore be defined as the state that we are in when the demands that are made upon us exceed our ability to cope – and this differs from person to person.
Tags: bloodstream, central nervous system, conscious control, flight reaction, human body, life style, physical stress, physical symptoms of stress, stress reactions, stressor, stressors