tiger did not utter, “Here, kitty, kitty”, but who rather responded with an acute flight-or-fight response (hopefully, until they developed great spears, it was way more flight than fight) were clearly more able to live long enough to pass their genes on to future generations, which is precisely, of course, why a stress response has persisted in our genes: it’s our signal to mobilize us to do something about a challenge or threat to our well-being. Ergo, displaying some level of anxiety is not only often beneficial, sometimes it’s essential for survival. When the threat goes away, however, this response should turn off.
. .. In our modern hurry-up culture, however, parts of this flight-or-fight response are forever slightly (or, for too many people, often very highly) in the “on” mode, that is, modern day life has led many of us to live with a nearly constant flow of stress hormones into our bloodstream and bathing our brains, a situation that has been linked to a host of medical problems including heart disease, high blood pressure, worsening cognitive function, headaches, chronic pain, and lots of other problems you really don’t want to get. In fact, it can be argued that chronic stress is associated with nearly every health problem you can think of by either helping to produce that problem or by worsening the symptoms of a problem that’s already there.
. .. How do you know if you’re under excessive chronic stress and that you should do something about it? Well, you could depend on symptoms to guide you, but
. .. 1) symptoms from chronic stress can be frustratingly
subtle (they can also, of course, scream their
presence)
. .. 2) stress-related symptoms are easy to attribute to
other, more socially-acceptable conditions, and anyway,
. .. 3) most of us have developed a very keen ability to
deny that we’re suffering from excess stress no
matter how evident it may be to others.
. .. So overt symptoms are often not a reliable guide to whether we should be doing something about the constant stress all of us are always under. Much better for most of us, I think, is a simple honest self-appraisal: do I feel that I’m under too much stress? Am I exhibiting behaviors that could be attributed to chronic stress? And if I’m not sure, what does someone very close to me think? It’s amazing how much more honest others can be about us than we are about ourselves.
. .. So how can you deal with chronic stress?
The most important thing to acknowledge often is that the most overt cause of the stress will rarely dissipate on its own. For example, a boss who’s giving you daily headaches and causing your acne to flare is not |
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