STRESS

“Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”
-Khalil Gibran 

Another major destructive force on our immune system is chronic stress. Most of us inherently know this without doing much about it in our own lives or our communities. Instead, we give our power away to doctors, pills, medications, or the trendy cure of the moment. By treating symptoms rather than root causes, we mask pain and obtain temporary relief. The result is a continuation of the unhealthy, stress-based lifestyle we engage in, which in turn causes more stress and its associated health consequences. 

The medical definition of stress was originally coined by Dr. Hans Selye in 1936 as a “non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.” He later changed his definition of stress to “the rate of wear and tear on the body,” but I prefer Dr. Gabor Mate’s interpretation of Selye’s work. He describes stress “as a biological process — a wide- ranging set of events in the body, irrespective of cause or of subjective awareness; stress consists of the internal alterations, visible or not that occur when the organism perceives a threat to its existence or well-being; one can be stressed without feeling tension; Stress can be triggered in people with no subjective awareness on their part that they are experiencing stress.” 

For most of us, stress is the nervous agitation we experience in situations involving excessive demands, usually in the areas of work, family, relationships, finances, or health. Despite what you might think, stress is not a subjective feeling. Rather, it is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system, and other organs.25 Animals and humans can experience stress with no awareness of its presence. Stress can even be produced in people who are under deep anesthesia, as well as in plants and cell cultures grown outside the body.26 Hans Selye described excessive stress as occurring when the demands on an organism exceeds that organism’s reasonable capacities to fulfill them. It can be triggered by physical damage, emotional trauma, or the threat of those occurrences — even if imaginary.27 

According to Dr. Mate, the experience of stress has three components. The first is the stress stimulus or the stressor, which is the physical or emotional event that the organism interprets as threatening. Then there is the processing system that experiences and interprets the meaning of the stressor (i.e., the nervous system and brain in humans). The final component is the stress response, which consists of the physiological and behavioral adjustments to a perceived threat. Because stress response depends on the processing systems that assign meaning, the stress levels of certain events vary across different people. For example, losing one's job might be experienced more powerfully by someone whose identity and role are tied to the role, or by someone whose livelihood depends on a paycheck. There are no universal responses to stressors. How we each experience stress is a matter of our unique personal dispositions and personal histories. 

Thanks to increasing scientific research in this area, we understand the link between stress and illness. Stress is a normal part of life and is experienced by all humans and animals. However, whereas most animals are good at shaking off the effects of stress and moving on after the threat is over, humans are often unable to turn of stress responses in our bodies. We actually tend to turn on stress responses automatically by thought alone. Even worse, for many people in today’s modern world, which is always connected through technology, many people aren’t able to turn off their body’s stress response. Instead, they keep pushing the train until it falls off the tracks and their bodies collapse in serious illness that requires long periods of rest. If you do not take care of your body on a regular basis, it will force you to slow down by becoming sick and frail. 

So how exactly does stress a)ect our body and cause these changes to occur? 

When we become stressed or overwhelmed, our bodies increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol. In small doses, cortisol boosts our immune system and acts as an anti-inflammatory agent in our body. Since most physical illness and disease stems from inflammation, the production of cortisol initially helps to protect the body. However, as life stressors persist, our bodies develop too much cortisol in the blood, which has the opposite effect of making our bodies more vulnerable to inflammation and disease.28  Furthermore, stress negatively affects our immune system by reducing the number of white blood cells, or lymphocytes, which fight off infection. Finally, chronic stress often leads to an increased likelihood for depression and anxiety, thereby creating even more inflammation and triggering a negative loop that can be difficult to stop. Over time, our bodies (and immune systems) become so overworked that they cannot properly protect themselves, leading to physical illness. Long-term chronic stress has been linked to countless diseases such as cancer, heart disease, type II diabetes, auto-immune disorders, arthritis, fibromyalgia, lupus, psoriasis, gastric ulcers, and inflamatory bowel disease — along with an abundance of mental health disorders.29 

The powerful connection between stress and poor health was made abundantly clear to me during my doctoral program where the professors preached the value of self-care. However, hardly any of them modeled it or made it a priority themselves. Out of the 26 students in my doctoral program (22 of whom were women in their mid to late 20s), six developed cancerous cysts within a two-year period. I recall watching people run themselves ragged studying, working, parenting, barely getting any rest and then becoming ill for weeks at a time. The number of sick people increased during exams and other periods of high stress, mirroring the pioneering research in psychoneuroimmunology conducted by Dr. Janice Glaser and Dr. Ronald Glaser.30 I watched this occurring around me while never becoming sick myself. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I came down with a severe illness or cold. The reason for this, I believe, stems from my commitment to self-care, ample sleep, a healthy diet, meditation, and regular exercise. 

There is a whole branch of science called psychoneuroimmunology, which examines the influences of physical and mental stressors on the function of our central nervous system and immune system. This field of science has been around since the early 1980s and gained a great deal of attention and momentum in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet hardly anyone I encounter in my professional career knows what psychoneuroimmunology is, let alone the implications of research in the field. Why are these scientific findings not making their way into mainstream medical and mental health training programs? 

Something has to change with our monetized, mainstream medical system and the way it places profit over everything else. From a research standpoint, the influence these companies and universities wield dictates which areas of medical research receive continued funding. In turn, this determines what information ends up in medical journals, influencing our medical practitioners’ education, training, and practice. The result is a regenerating stock of doctors who support a flawed system and a populace that feels dependent on pills and procedures for healing. It is time to wake up and demand more funding and research to be poured into psychoneuroimmunology, epigenetics, and other holistic healing practices. These studies must be conducted by unbiased institutions that are not driven by a profit motive or an academic agenda. 

Imagine what would happen if we promoted mind-body research to society, empowering people to take control of their health and their lives? Why are we not incorporating these findings into schooling and education for our children and adolescents, who are currently experiencing the highest rates of stress, anxiety, addiction, depression, and suicide in our society? It is beyond my comprehension why we do not teach things like psychology, meditation, yoga, breathwork, martial arts and other empowering stress management skills to our children in every school across the country. These lessons would serve them and others for the rest of their lives.