ONE NATION UNDER STRESS, OR, CAN A CAVEMAN SURVIVE IN MODERN SOCIETY?

How Our Bodies Respond to Stress
For the past 20,000 years, mankind has responded to stress in the same way. Whenever we perceive, or imagine, something to be dangerous, the sympathetic nervous system ignites the fight/flight system to prepare us to meet the challenge. The powerful hormones adrenaline and cortisol course through our bodies and within seconds we are ready for action with tight muscles, rapid heartbeat, elevated blood pressure, and slower digestion. Blood is diverted from our gut to our brains, and our hands become cool and clammy. Breathing becomes rapid and shallow to increase oxygen levels in the body. Our liver pours glucose, i.e. sugar, into the blood to provide the necessary fuel for active muscles. White blood cells increase in the blood, equipping the immune system to combat any potential infection. Blood-clotting factors are released in case of injury. Our senses are heightened and we begin to perspire.
When Dangers Are Within
Basically the nature of our stresses has changed dramatically since our hunter/gatherer days, but our DNA driven stress system has not. Few would argue that contemporary life is easy just because the lions and tigers are out of the picture. In fact, most people seem to feel that life today is getting more and more stressful all the time. We don’t have to hunt for our food but we do have to pay for it at the supermarket. We also have other bills to pay including house payments or rent, utilities, car payments, furniture, college educations for our kids, cable TV, Internet providers – the list seems to grow every year because there’s more and more that we supposedly can’t do without. It is imperative that we succeed at work just to make ends meet, yet the ever more flexible, fast-changing, global economy makes our jobs insecure even when our performance is exemplary. It doesn’t help that we have to drive to those insecure jobs every day on congested roads and freeways. And that all that traffic just eats up more hours in a day that was already woefully short for all that we had to crowd into it. When we get home from work, we turn on the television newscast and hear about various crises – global warming, collapsing economies in other countries that are linked to our own, rogue nations with dangerous weapons – that threaten us in some vague way but are too massive and complex for us ever to resolve even if we dedicate our lives to it. For many of us, the delicate state of our personal relationships seem, to our minds anyway, to threaten our survival, too. Yet, we can no more solve those problems in any final way than we can end tensions in the Middle East. There is no doubt as to the proper course of action for a caveman facing a saber-tooth tiger — he flees or he dies. His stress system serves him well. It prepares him to run away, and if he is fortunate enough to escape, he will then rest while his parasympathetic system returns his aroused system to normal. But in the absence of tigers and other physical threats, the stress system backfires. Consider financial or relationship worries, for example. Even if we take action steps from the beginning, the crisis will probably persist for some time. Yet the fight/flight stress system is the same as it was for cave dwellers millions of years ago. It readies our bodies for physical action — our muscles tense, we get red as our blood pressure rises, our stomach churns, our heart pounds, and our hands become sweaty. If there’s no appropriate physical action for situation, it may take hours or even days for the body to dissipate the aroused state. In the meantime, we sort of stew in our own juices.
So, what can we do about this profound evolutionary paradox?
To explore this important issue, let’s look again at the mind/body anatomy of the fight or flight system. The “on-switch” for the stress system is a tiny patch of brain tissue called the hypothalamus, located in the center of the brain. The hypothalamus controls and regulates the entire autonomic nervous system including, of course, the sympathetic branch. The hypothalamus, as the name implies, sits just below the thalamus, a small and mysterious organ that in turn sits just beneath the cerebral cortex, the thinking center of the brain. The thalamus receives information – other than smells — from the body’s sensory organs. It then relays this input to the cerebral cortex. This sensory information constitutes our awareness of the world around us. We use it in thinking and in responding to the sensory input. The hypothalamus is the command center for many primary body functions including hormonal balance, appetite and food intake, and sexual function as well as complex motivational states such as fatigue, hunger, anger, and placidity. Effectively, it is the emotional headquarters of the brain, and also harmonizes the behaviors associated with emotional states. “Wired” to the hypothalamus, the brain stem and spinal cord below it extend into the body like the trunk of an inverted tree, with branches reaching downward into every part of the human system. Emotions spark the hypothalamus to “electrify” our feelings through the autonomic nervous system into the familiar bodily sensations of emotional arousal. Emotions may be the most obvious proof that mind and body are one because while we think of emotions as occurring in our minds, they are in fact total body experiences. Emotions have many variations and names. But if we distill them down, they all relate to the primary, and polar, emotions of love and fear. Love encompasses the experiences of compassion, fondness, happiness, joy, among many other positive states. The derivatives of fear include anger, resentment, frustration, worry, and anxiety, among many others. When received from someone or given to others, love has the power to heal the body. It is also a lifeblood emotion – an infant denied love may fail to thrive or even die. To understand how emotions do harm means understanding fear and its derivatives, and in particular the fears that are common in contemporary life. Fears trip the fight-or-flight switch in the hypothalamus. That’s fine for a cave person or a modern rock climber. One way or another, that fear will soon be expressed and released and in the meantime it can heighten awareness, prepare the person for quicker responses, and otherwise help ensure survival.