Stress and Its Effects

In all of our bodies there’s a constant war going on between our immune systems and various bacteria and viruses. We have all of these bad guys in our bodies at all times trying to bring us down, but our good guys hold them off and keep us alive and well.

When our immune systems falter, we lose the war and we get sick.

Going back to the early days of humans when we were escaping death from large predators, we evolved the fight or flight response, aka the stress response. When confronted with a dangerous situation, the blood in our bodies would rush from our guts, where our internal organs reside, to our extremities (arms & legs) so we could more effectively fight the predator or run our asses off. Once the danger had passed, we would calm down and the blood would return to our guts and continue the war against our internal invaders.

Our bodies thought, “Well I know we really should keep the nutritious blood around our organs to keep fighting the war, but at this second, it’s much more important to move a bunch of it to our arms and legs so we can get the fuck out of here, otherwise we’ll be dead.” And our bodies were right to think in this way. The game plan worked. Humans still exist.

This is obviously a simple explanation. I doubt you’d want to hear all of the specific processes that occur. Adrenaline levels, blood pressure, etc. Borrring.

Also, I don’t know them.

The stress response is a bit obsolete in civilized nations, generally speaking. We don’t really have to fight or run away to survive. Yet the response still exists in us. In modern society, it’s often activated 24/7 from everyday stresses like love, money, work (especially work), family, etc. I’m sure you can think of a hundred sources of stress in your life.

Although these modern-day stresses aren’t life-threatening in themselves, our bodies do not distinguish between them and the stresses of our ancestors. So the physiological response to sabre-toothed tigers trying to eat our faces and creditors continually calling us is pretty much the same: blood flows to the extremities, away from our guts, and we are ill-equipped to fight our internal wars. In the short term this is fine. We quickly return to homeostasis. But when the source of stress is continual, our bodies maintain the stressed state. We get sick. We get cancer. We die from stress which was never life-threatening in itself, but became so because of our inability to deal with it effectively.

To clarify: that is not to say that cancer or sickness in general is always caused by stress and that those with cancer/sickness could have avoided it with proper thinking in every case. The point is that we are turning the odds against ourselves by allowing unnecessary stress in our lives. Some very relaxed people get sick and some very stressed people never get sick.

Unfortunately, although modern stresses aren’t as serious as we make them out to be, or as we treat them with our bodies, removing them is not easy. It may seem impossible. But it’s really important to minimize or eliminate them.

Our individual stresses are often unique to us, and no one can tell us how to remove them. We have to figure it out on our own. I wish I could write, “Do ____ and you’ll have no stress.” I have this wish not only so I could help you, but also so I could be a trillion- or zillionaire.

Some things that help me reduce or eliminate stress are meditation, an outcome-independent mindset, and keeping everything in perspective. Maybe those will work for you, maybe they won’t. Figure it out unless you wanna die an early, painful, gruesome death.

Just kidding (but not really).