|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
...by Paul T. Harig, Ph.D. Colonel, US Army
Stress and the mind-body connection According to medical educator Timothy Brigham, stress is "the basic confusion created when one's mind overrides the body's desire to choke the living daylights out of some jerk who desperately deserves it."
Because stress is so ubiquitous and stress management so sweeping, it is tempting to dismiss this subject as a fad or to trivialize it. Confronted with more serious problems of mankind and attempting to find real solutions under deadlines, ambiguity, insufficient resources and conflicting social priorities, one's patience for something that seems "all in your head" can be quite limited. Popular stress management prescriptions like, "make time for rest and recreation" can sound astonishishly naive and irrelevant to the fast pace and high-tempo of a modern executive. Accustomed to bulldozing through personal obstacles and achieving crisp goals, the fuzziness and wimpy nature of stress is foreign. No wonder then some of the most distressed leaders deny their stress until they experience physical or mental burnout. Some of these symptoms are becoming more common: feelings of intense fatigue; vulnerability to illness; feelings of lack of control over commitments; an incorrect belief that you are accomplishing less; a growing tendency to think negatively; loss of a sense of purpose and energy; and increasing detachment from relationships, causing conflict and more stress. Moreover, corporate downsizing sometimes puts more work and strain on the survivors, causing them to resist acknowledgment of their distress, especially if it is regarded as personal weakness. They personify the words of a satirist who likened the business world to life among sharks and advised: "When swimming with sharks, don't bleed." The very definition of stress has been vague and inconsistent, sometimes referring to an outside force, sometimes to the body's reaction to it. In the scientific literature, no definition has succeeded in capturing the complete nature of this complex phenomenon, or even of satisfying the majority of stress researchers. Notes psychologist Kenneth Pelletier of the Stanford University Corporate Health Program, scientists have at least agreed, however, that stress is not what happens to someone -- those outside forces are the stressors -- but how a person reacts to what happens. He explains that the distinction caps a long evolution in our understanding of stress. In a great deal of early work, stress was thought of as a universal force acting on a passive body. A classic illustration is found in the early research of two psychologists, Drs. Robert Yerkes and John Dodson. They demonstrated an "inverted-U" relationship between performance or efficiency and stress, suggesting that there is an optimal point at which stress promotes performance, with either too little or too much stress associated with poor performance. It was once assumed that all people would react in more or less the same way to crises or disruptions and that such extreme "stresses" were likely to be hazardous to health. But there is no direct link, researchers have discovered, because people differ in their reaction to events and disturbances -- one person's exhilaration at an exciting challenge can be another's anxiety and dismay, and there can be profound contrasts among people in the outcome of both positive and negative events on their health. By focusing on how a person reacts, rather than on the external events, science has helped us to appreciate the extent to which the mind can influence the body. As Dr. Pelletier explains, "Mind and body are inextricably linked, and their second-by-second interaction exerts a profound influence upon health and illness, life and death. Attitudes, beliefs, and emotional states ranging from love and compassion to fear and anger can trigger chain reactions that affect blood chemistry, heart rate, and the activity of every cell and organ system in the body, from the stomach and the gastrointestinal tract to the immune system." In the most accurate meaning, stress management is not about learning how to avoid or escape the pressures and turbulence of modern living; it is about learning to appreciate how the body reacts to these pressures, and about learning how to develop skills which enhance the body's adjustment. To learn stress management is to learn about the mind-body connection and the degree to which we can control our health in a positive sense. The mind's influence on the body has been known to medicine from its beginnings. Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine, equated health to a state of harmony between the mind, the body and nature. Evidence for the mind-body connection has scientific roots in the work of physiologist Walter Cannon who, at the turn of the twentieth Century, first described the fight-or-flight response, the internal adaptive response of the body to a threat. In this involuntary response, the body secretes hormones that immediately raise the heartbeat, liberate fuel for energy, and drive blood to the large muscles, preparing a person or animal under threat to fight or run away. The most Familiar of these stress hormones is adrenaline. In prehistoric times, the fight-or flight response had an adaptive purpose for occasions when humans faced threats of physical harm from predators. It was the emergency mechanism that focused the body's operations on survival. The cascade of physiological changes induced by the outpouring of the body's "stress" hormones all support this goal: heart rate, blood pressure and muscle tension all rise sharply; the stomach and intestines become less active, the level of blood sugar rises for quick energy; fatty acids are released from storage into the bloodstream; peripheral blood vessels constrict; and blood platelets become sticky so that clotting time decreases. Endowed with the ability to reason and learn, early man developed a fight-or-flight response which could trigger physiological changes on the basis of anticipation of a threat. This psychological advantage permitted humans to ready their physical resources for fighting or running by recognizing signs or conditions under which attack was possible. Unfortunately, our ancestors' psychological advantage over predators now causes the body to react to all of today's challenges as it does to physical threat, even when they are not to be handled by fighting or running. What's more, the mind can store and reproduce their memory for replay many times over, causing them to be reexperienced throughout the day, even when the real stressors have withdrawn. The fact that the body reacts to today's stressors -- more often psychological and interpersonal -- as if it were preparing for a real physical threat, means that we experience the fight-or-flight response significantly more than our prehistoric ancestors did. Dr. Herbert Benson, a Harvard Medical School cardiologist, estimates that the average person experiences 30-50 adrenaline hits a day, compared with one or two from prehistoric threats. That means that 30-50 times per day the heart speeds up, extra fats circulate in the blood (they will later condense into cholesterol), blood vessels clamp down, and muscles tense. If you are under chronic stressors -- for example, if you're facing constant deadline pressure, or having major difficulties with your spouse -- your body reacts with the same physical changes that would be appropriate for a near miss on the freeway or the reaction to a loud noise, explains Stanford's Dr. Pelletier. Moreover, under chronic, long-term stressors the perfectly normal fight-or-flight responses are protracted and can lead to chronic disease or contribute to its development.
Evidence for the mind-body connection through the fight-or-flight response has been accumulating at a brisk rate since a serendipitous discovery by Dr. Robert Adler, a psychologist at the University of Rochester in 1974. While conducting a learning experiment on white rats, Dr. Adler discovered that the immune system can be conditioned, just like Pavlov had shown that dogs can be trained to salivate at the sight of food. Adler's research opened the way for a field of medical science known as psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), the study of the links between thoughts and emotions, the brain and the nervous system, and the immune system. PNI has deepened our understanding of how the physiological changes which occur under emotional distress may make people more susceptible to autoimmune disease, infectious disease, and cancer. Taken together, the evidence from 20 years of research confirm that the "stress" hormones generally suppress immune responses. Even more fascinating, the cells actively involved in the immune system have been shown to produce substances, the interleukins and interferons, chemicals that immune system cells use to communicate, that can trigger cells in the brain. "This is evidence that the immune system and the nervous system speak the same chemical language," comment Drs. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and husband Ron Glaser, prominent PNI researchers.
Source: Stress and the Mind-Body Connection by Paul T. Harig, Ph.D. Colonel, US Army, A Guide for Senior Leaders
This article represents a chapter from "Executive Wellness: A Guide for Senior Leaders", an online book written and edited by staff and contributors at the U.S. Army Physical Fitness Research Institute (USAPFRI), U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.
|
 |
| Sponsored by the Army National Guard, and the Office of the Chief, Army Reserve. Copyright 2010 |
Whether or not one takes a more conventional view than Dr. Brigham, we live in a busy world where conflicts, disappointments, frustrations, losses and pressures can make us feel nervous, keep us awake at night, get us angry, or make us sick. It is impossible to be alive and live without stress. Not surprisingly, stress has become the fashionable disorder of our time, and treatment of stress is an extraordinarily popular and profitable activity where everyone can participate. Dr. Ethel Roskies, a Canadian therapist who has spent over 15 years treating stressed-out managers and professionals, sarcastically observed, "The most distinctive characteristic of stress management as a treatment is its universality; there is no one for whom treatment is apparently unneeded or inappropriate."
