If you are a gazelle running for your life, or a tiger sprinting for your meal, the body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of animals on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over or you’re dead. Simple eh?
Unfortunately things aren’t so simple in humans. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses but these are in fact potentially disastrous when provoked chronically.
Long-term worry
A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related diseases predominantly emerge because we over-activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies. Nowadays many people turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships and promotions.
It is not a general mammalian trait to become anxious about money, the tax man, about public speaking or fears of what you will say in a job interview. Our human experience is overloaded with psychological stressors, a far cry from the physical world of hunger, injury, blood loss, or temperature extremes.
When we activate the stress-response out of fear of something that turns out to be real, we congratulate ourselves that this cognitive skill allows us to mobilise our defences early. And these anticipatory defences can be quite protective, because it allows us to be preparative.
However when we get into a physiological uproar and activate the stress-response for no reason at all, or over something we cannot do anything about, we label it “anxiety,” “neurosis,” “paranoia,” or “needless hostility.”
Clients’ stress stories
As a health physiologist I see an interesting range of clients with different stories to tell. Some say they are very stressed and some say they are coping with stress, or have low stress levels. But how well do they know their own body? Are most of our clients chronically stressed and always present in ‘fight or flight’ mode, or are most in a stage of chronic fatigue, where the stress response has been blunted?
How do we know? When do we subjectively and objectively test their stress response and what do we do with the information? How does this affect their health? What can it mean for potential onset of disease? And if they have disease, what does it to that disease? How do we then take action?
Learn more
If you want to learn more, book the Stress: A Modern Day Epidemic course. This one-day workshop looks at stress, disease and coping mechanisms.
The day includes an explanation of practical subjective and objective measures you can use with your clients to help guide them to a better health through stress management.
Book the Stress: A Modern Day Epidemic course now.
21st February 2015
Northwood Hills, Middlesex
