Stress - The Modern Disease
July 31st, 2008 | 
Author: 
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
Posted in 
Tags:
December 3rd, 2008 9:21 pm
I think you hit on a good point when you say that stress has a very large physical component to it. I think regular exercise should be the number one strategy in any stress management plan. Attacking stress first from a physical standpoint you can eliminate a great chunk of it’s effects, and, beyond that, then work on the residual mental aspects.