Stress

• Response adapted for short-term, physical emergencies
• Provoked chronically & for psychological stressors (or the mere expectation of)
  

  For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses—but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically.

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Acute stress response

• Rapid mobilize of energy, inhibition of storage
• Halt long-term, high energy cost functions
  • Digestion
  • Reproduction, sex drive
  • Growth & repair
  • Immunity
• Analgesia to keep going

Response = more harmful

The army does not run out of bullets. Instead, the body spends so much on the defense budget that it neglects education and health care and social services (okay, so I may have a hidden agenda here). It is not so much that the stress-response runs out, but rather, with sufficient activation, that the stress-response can become more damaging than the stressor itself, especially when the stress is purely psychological.

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Stress → disease → sickness

Thus, medical practitioners often say, in effect, “You feel sick because you have disease X, not because of some nonsense having to do with stress; however, this ignores the stressors’ role in bringing about or worsening the disease in the first place.

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Psychological → brain’s far-reaching effects regulation

You sit in your chair not moving a muscle, and simply think a thought, a thought having to do with feeling angry or sad or euphoric or lustful, and suddenly your pancreas secretes some hormone. Your pancreas? How did you manage to do that with your pancreas? You don’t even know where your pancreas is. Your liver is making an enzyme that wasn’t there before, your spleen is text-messaging something to your thymus gland, blood flow in little capillaries in your ankles has just changed. All from thinking a thought.

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Autonomic Nervous System

• Activates sympathetic
• Inhibits parasympathetic

HPA axis
hypothalamus → pituitary → adrenal glands

It is now recognized that the base of the brain, the hypothalamus, contains a huge array of those releasing and inhibiting hormones, which instruct the pituitary, which in turn regulates the secretions of the peripheral glands.

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• Epinephrine & norepinephrine: vigilance, anxiety
• Glucocorticoids (cortisol): depression ^6e1395
• Endorphin: blunt pain
• Vasopressin: water retention, blood pressure ↑

Psychological, subconscious pressures, not just physical

Moreover, all sorts of psychological stressors could trigger them, like public speaking, pressured interviews, exams. According to the old dogma, if you had heart disease, you had better worry when you were undergoing physical stress and getting chest pains. Now it appears that, for someone at risk, trouble is occurring under all sorts of circumstances of psychological stress in everyday life, and you may not even know it.

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NYC = risk factor: ^9df141

Cardiovascular diseases

• Stress causes through blood vessel damage: Status & Heart Disease
• Fatal heart attack: acute shock, threat, grief, recovery, triumph, pleasure
  • Extremes trigger same response: predator/prey, hot/cold ^3bcf6b