Anti-Quackery & Science Blog
When I start feeling a cold coming on with the normal symptoms, aches and tiredness, sore throat and fever. You know. My best remedy has been to simply rest and drink fluids. Water and juice, not sodas or beer. 
This gives my body the opportunity to direct all its recourses to fight the intruding virus. If I don't rest it often only prolongs the symptoms. Could it be that stress can have a similar effect on our bodies ability to maintain a certain chemical balance or be in a weakened state that will make it vulnerable. For example sleep deprivation and it's possible negative affects on the body and mind. I don't know anything except that naps feel good.
regards- JT
Stress has been unbearable for me for the last 4 yrs. when I started to work and got married. Indeed, it worsens day by day and I am scared that one day I might collapse and just die! It could be possible though.
It could well be (and there have been studies alluding to this, I''l have to get back to you with the references) that a certain level of stress prevents sickness. When you remove the stress, you succumb to background, low-level pathogens more readily.
Like I say, I'll have to find the references, but anecdotally - fall in love, go on holiday, take time out and inevitably you'll catch a cold (could just be exposure to new viruses, but could just as easily be something to do with stress levels falling).
I'd say that stress is anything that happens to a person, that requires some kind of adaptive response. But it is not the stress itself that hurts you, it is the stress response. If the response is extreme, or maladaptive, then it can be damaging.
Stress response can be changed, often to a beneficial effect.
google and read Robert Sapolsky. he's been working for decades on the effects of stress in primates.
I am compiling a new blogroll of atheist and agnostic blogs. if you would like to be included in this list please leave a reply here :
Are You An Atheist Or An Agnostic?
http://beepbeepitsme.blogspot.co...r-
agnostic.html
Stress is part of our day to day life,
but we have to be aware of it, to avoid it. Expert says that most illness are because of stress.
We have to relax in some moment during the day and think about what we are doing, evaluate the situation and then take a consicious decision.
One theory of depression is that prolonged stress keeps cortisol levels up and thus bodychemistry (or more exactly, synaptic response) is altered.
I haven't followed the trail on the validity of that theory, though.
There is no mind/body/spirit,
only BODY.
Distress to the brain/emotions
IS
distress to the body.
Stay on Groovin' Safari,
TOR
Medicine has come a long way since the 1930s, and so has our understanding of the body's reaction to various external stressors.
Yes, stress is bad for your health. More importantly, stress reduction improves health.
Spencer needs to go (back?) to school.
Some people say that regular an adrenaline spike in blood, caused by the stress, is good for heart.
` Even stress that I have that is supposedly good makes me zone out. I have an over-reaction to it because I was abused horribly throughout most of my life.
` My reaction is also probably surprising, considering the recent content of my blog....
Hi,
Very Very Nice blog very informative. Hope you don't mind but i have bookmarked it.
Financial Blog Home Business Blog Affiliate Blog
It's not stress that makes us sick, it's how we handle the stress response that holds the key. Stress is inevitable, but we evolved within a pattern that allowed the body to recover equilibrium after being flooded with biochemical response to stressors. Race around after a wooly mammoth, then; kick back at the fireside, eat, sleep and procreate for a couple of days or weeks. Modern life's stressors are so ubiquitious that we live in a state of stress instead of only being subjected to it occasionally. So, if everyday we wind up with elevated cortisol response due to a near miss in traffic (for example), its harder for the systems of our body to recoup and replenish. Viewed that way, its not so surprising that some of us lose the ability to normalize altogether and then begin to notice other health problems. You mention civilization as if it exists outside of our experience of it. Rather odd for someone who fancies themselves a critical thinker. Surely whatever else it may be, civilization is the result of collective human action — and inaction. So why wouldn't we expect individuals to be affected by the circumstances and the times in which they live?
What do you say about Homoeopathy then?
?
The way we handle stress will have an impcat to our health.
So handle your stress right way.
Cancer Type
Life is bad for your health. Every single death ever recorded was immediately preceeded by life. QED.
It´s the same problem like in the cancer vid. Stress is oxigen stress and leads to illness.
As long as we continue to think of stress as something that just “happens to us”, we will never consider prevention. But stress prevention is something that we can “learn” just by shifting our perceptions and responses to what is happening. An understanding of what causes stress and using it as a tool to shift our perceptions can lead to our ability to prevent stress from happening. I have conducted corporate classes regarding stress prevention, and it does work.
I think its a matter of balance. Too much or little of anything is not good for you and throws your system out of wack. The stress reaction is "fight or flight give it your all to get out of this situation, consequences be damned." So if you carry that sensation around in your life 24/7 you're going to pay for it physiologically even if in some situations, yes it IS necessary.
I agree how we handle situations that cause a stress reaction is the key, because avoiding these situations keeps us from evolving in all facets of the term.
I wish I still had the references but I printed out a scientific study for my mom on psychological backgrounds effect the healing process, specifically back pain in this particular study (my mom's problem). Those who still suffered from psychological traumas didn't seem to heal as well as those with very few past traumas. But most fascination of all was that those patients who sought psychological treatment to deal with those past traumas healed the best.
If stress is bunk, why did the use of defibrillators spike after 9-11 in places like Florida?
See Pubmed:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
entr...t_uids=15364330
A little exposure to cold can be a good 'stress'. Too much cold causes hypothermia. A little adrenaline and cortisol can be adaptive; too much is bad.
Is that really so complicated?
I have no doubt stress brings on illness. But what is also starnge that in times of extreme stress, I have fought though tough battles, without getting ill at all. I had no time to be ill.
Its amazing how strong the body can be when its wants to be.
Mark
AA
Think about the concept of "stress" in evolutionary terms for just a moment. How would it be to an organism's advantage in survival or reproduction if, when faced with a difficulty, the organism is irrevocably damaged by its response to that difficulty? [Ooh, danger, I better secrete something to poison myself!”]
Now consider our ancestors - whose lives shaped our bodies - brains & hormones included - who faced a world where wild animals might eat them, where famine was a real fact of life, where a woman was more likely to die in childbirth than suffer menopause and half of children born died before age 5. How do you think they would respond to long-lived desk jockeys claiming to be damaged by some invisible/unmeasurable/subjective - but definitely not deadly - malady known as "stress"?
I think our big problem as a society is not "stress" - it is that we have forgotten how easy we have it. Life expectancy has nearly doubled since 1900, from approx. 47.3 to 77.2.
I'm not saying life is perfect - the fact that the wealthiest 5% of Americans are getting richer while everyone else is losing ground is pretty bad - but that our bodies are stronger than we give them credit for.
I took a class in graduate school on psychoneuroimmunology - all about how stress and its physiological effects can alternately enhance or suppress immunity.
In a nutshell - A little bit of stress boost the action of immune cells, but too much stress, for too long, or too unpredictable causes an upsurge in chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline that when sustained over time makes T cells, B cells, NK cells and the like less potent *and* kills them.
Robert Sapolsky's research is well-known; he's written some very entertaining (hilarious) and *informative* popular press books on health and stress. I recommend Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. He's best known for showing that chronic stress damages various parts of the brain, importantly the hippocampus, which is crucial for memory.
Quite a hodgepodge of incorrect facts here ... starting with Mr. Spencer's date for Dr. Selye's death. It was Oct 12, 1982. More grievously, your gross overestimation of the role of physiological and environmental causes of disease. In fact, the National Academy of Science estimates that 35% of all MD visits are exclusively caused by stress; and as many as 80% are co-determined by chronic elevated stress.
You suffer from the environment vs. genetics vs. psychosocial artificial distinction. Consider clinically diagnosed depression: Yes, the presence of the 5-HT (short) gene predisposes to depression. BUT in the absence of (a) long enduring situational challenges PLUS (b) fatalistic coping style, depression does rarely results. All three often are inextricably interwoven causal factors.
I hope future rants will do more fact checking.
I do, however, agree that the general public has too often latched onto the equally spurious "good vs bad stress" notion ... being led to blame the truly wonderful energy-source that stress is for just existentially nasty conditions. See my recent post at www.selyestressinsights.typepad.com
Two things:
1. "In a nutshell - A little bit of stress boost the action of immune cells, but too much stress, for too long, or too unpredictable causes an upsurge in chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline that when sustained over time makes T cells, B cells, NK cells and the like less potent *and* kills them." - Holly
Again, I have to ask, why would animals who evolved in an environment that included predators; substantial risk of death in childbirth; no concept of sterile conditions; no reliable medicines like antibiotics; waterborne diseases like deadly cholera; having to physically work for one's food; no reliable food storage/vulnerability to famine; would produce toxic chemicals in reaction to the kinds of events that occur in offices, suburbs, cities?
2.Why don't zebras get ulcers? They don't kiss people with h. pylori infections. Rhesus monkeys get ulcers when infected with h. pylori.
Ulcers are not caused by stress!
Ulcers are caused by: 1. h.pylori bacteria, 2. [less commonly] when poor closure of the lower end of the stomach allows pancreatic enzymes to back up into the stomach - this is a mechanical/chemical problem. Ulcers are not a reaction to events in the workplace or unhappy romances or financial difficulties.
As someone who has suffered ulcers [and other stomach problems related to GI birth defects], who spent childhood being told that "You just don't want to go to school", I get irritated that even after the Nobel Prize was given to the discoverers of h. pylori's role in ulcers, people still refer to ulcers as a "stress-related" illness. Before society blamed "stress" ulcers were supposed [by the healthy] to have been caused by a cranky attitude [what surprises me is that no one ever thought the crankiness might come from the ulcers...]
I think we, as a society, would waste a lot less time, and make life happier & more comfortable for sick people, if we'd just accept that physical diseases have physical causes, and that people's personalities don't make them vulnerable to conditions that are caused by microbes who don't care how much we owe VISA, whether our lovers are cheating or how secure our jobs are. People can always find some unhappy event to retrofit as a cause for an illness if they believe that the contents of their thoughts/emotions influence which diseases they get or when they start to feel the illness [&/or improvement].
as anthropology major, (paleo to be exact) i can say this.stress is real, its a naturual condition for fight or flight.right, obvious stuff.we have a incredible metabolism and instant mechanisms in gear for it.the thing is, back in the day when you can see the tiger and therefore sense the tiger, experince the tiger it was pretty much healthy.we as modern humans however are taught in a rational mind.psychologically we face stress daily.stress of this sort has no substance, and can alter and evolve in life as we grow, if we dont identify it...fear of opposite sex can lead to fear of commitment which can be fear of abondonment...the mind stresses..the imagination challenges the archetypes.see, i think its like a trip to the fridge wher eyou dont know conciously what you want, so you stand with the door open while the mind seeks its query.
Whether or not nervousness around the opposite sex affects your sex life is not germaine to the argument about whether "stress" can cause physical disease.
Why is it so much easier to believe that mental reactions to unpleasant situations damage bodily functioning than it is to consider that people who believe that mental conditions cause physical disease might retrofit "stressful" events shortly before feeling ill as the "cause"?
Corelation does not equal causation.
Also, just because someone has published a "popular" book on a medical topic doesn't mean that it's either true or the last word on the subject. Many popular books were published about phrenology.
In response to a stressor, physiological changes are set into motion to help an individual cope with the stressor. However, chronic activation of these stress responses, which include the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and the sympathetic–adrenal–medullary axis, results in chronic production of glucocorticoid hormones and catecholamines. Glucocorticoid receptors expressed on a variety of immune cells bind cortisol and interfere with the function of NF-κB, which regulates the activity of cytokine-producing immune cells. Adrenergic receptors bind epinephrine and norepinephrine and activate the cAMP response element binding protein, inducing the transcription of genes encoding for a variety of cytokines. The changes in gene expression mediated by glucocorticoid hormones and catecholamines can dysregulate immune function. There is now good evidence (in animal and human studies) that the magnitude of stress-associated immune dysregulation is large enough to have health implications.
Commenting by HaloScan
