Stress, otherwise known as the fight-or-flight response, is a great thing if you need to lift a car off of a friend, or if you’re being chased by a tiger.
Stress is a physiological response that enables our bodies to muster the strength needed to deal with such situations.
Most of us, however, experience stress because we have too much to do and not enough time, or because we have trouble controlling our anger. For us, stress can contribute to — and sometimes actually cause — illness and disease.
“When you perceive an issue as being stressful, your brain triggers a physiological response that enacts the sympathetic nervous system to increase your heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate,” said Trudy Turvey, director of the Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation Program at the Mapleton Rehabilitation Center in Boulder, Colo. Stress, she added, causes the body to produce adrenaline and cortisol.
“Adrenaline, in an acute stress situation like if you had to immediately respond to danger, is very effective for us. But it’s an outdated system.”
It’s outdated, in part, because we don’t get the physical release our ancestors did during the hunting era.
Today, the things we perceive as stressful in our everyday lives — work deadlines, traffic jams, the elevator that takes too long — don’t really call for that fight-or-flight response. So our bodies end up suffering.
“(Cortisol) is something that in our body is chronically damaging,” Turvey said. “It damages the insides of our coronary arteries, it causes inflammation, it depresses the immune system, and it enhances the flow of free-fatty acids, which if released into your system on a daily basis are harmful.”
If the fat isn’t burned, it turns into cholesterol; the cholesterol starts to collect and form arterial sclerotic plaque; the blood pressure surge can damage arteries in the heart and cause them to become eroded; the immune system starts to break down, which in turn interferes with the body’s ability to fight off intruders, such as cancer cells.
“Basically, what this overactive fight-or-flight response can do is make us more susceptible to whatever pathogens we happen to encounter, like viruses outside the body, like chemicals or even genes that might make us more” vulnerable to diseases, such as certain types of diabetes or cancer, said Dr. Redford Williams, whose research at Duke University’s Behavioral Medicine Research Center focuses on the role of stress in medical illness, especially coronary heart disease.
Williams has found that people who have a problem with anger — they have a cynical mistrust of people, they’re angry often, or they overtly express anger — have higher early-death rates, more accidents and more absences from work.
Learning to manage stress is an important factor for about 90 percent of the cardiac patients Turvey works with, she says.
Take Francis Hauke.
This 68-year-old retired IBM engineer will tell you he doesn’t feel as though he’s led a particularly stressful lifestyle. But his wife tells him he’s a type-A personality, and he says he has a tendency to get stressed out when driving.
In October, Hauke had a heart attack. He believes part of his problem was high cholesterol, and part might have been genetic. But learning to deal with stress has played a definite role in his rehabilitation.
“I’ve become more aware of when I do start to get tensed up and stressed, which right now primarily occurs when I’m driving,” says Hauke.
So now, instead of letting that frustration build, Hauke can recognize that he’s stressed out, and he tells himself to calm down. Breathing from his diaphragm instead of his chest also helps him relax.
Exercise also is key to keeping his stress levels in check, Hauke says. While he always has been an avid hiker and walker, Hauke says he has become more diligent about his exercise routine, putting in an hour of walking a day.
“One of the key things to do if you want to check out your stress levels is to keep a check log,” says Williams. “Get a little notebook to fit in your pocket, and every time you feel stressed, then write down what the situation is, what you’re thinking, and what you’re feeling.”
For example, you’re driving home, and the traffic starts to slow, and you start feeling stressed. That would be the situation. Your thoughts might be, “Why do people have to drive so slowly? Why are people such bad drivers?” Your feelings might be annoyance, irritation, disgust.
If you have a lot of entries like that where your thoughts about other people are bad, or you’re annoyed or angry, then chances are you have a problem with stress.
Next, you need a way to evaluate and manage these feelings, Williams says.
Ask yourself three questions:
– Is this situation causing these thoughts and feelings important to me and my life? “What people are telling us is that about 20 to 40 percent of things that get them angry aren’t that important,” Williams says.
– Is my anger justified? If the car in front of you is moving slowly, which in turn holds you up, maybe consider that the person in front of you is older and needs to drive at that speed.
– Is there anything I can do to fix the situation? A man in a red sports car cuts you off on the highway to get to his exit. While the situation might be important to you because you could have been injured, and your anger might be justified, there really isn’t anything you can do about it because the man is gone.
If you answer “Yes” to all three questions, then you need to find a healthy way to deal with the situation.
“First of all, we try to get patients to be really in touch with who they are and what triggers them,” says Turvey. “We have them look at their spirituality and how that plays a part. What are they afraid of? We work to really help them get a grip on why these things are stressful for them. Why is a long red light stressful for me, but not for you? Some people in addition have a very altered sense of time and how they can do things. I might tuck 20 things in my day, where a more reasonable person might pack 10.”
