The disease and death rates due to stressrelated illness is very disturbing. Emotional
stress contributes greatly to the six leading
causes of death in the US. These are cancer,
coronary heart disease, accidental injuries,
respiratory disorders, cirrhosis of the liver and
suicide, respectively.(11)
The developed world, especially the United
States, consumes alarming amounts of
prescription drugs, with almost 50% of the
population taking one or more drugs within
the previous 30 days.(12)
Furthermore, depression is the leading cause
of disability worldwide, and contributes
greatly to the global disease burden.(13)
Can we afford for so many people to be sick
from or incapacitated from stress?
But what is stress?
We know when we feel it, but what is it?
In a nutshell, stress is the rate of adjustment
you, as a human being, have to go through in
order to adapt to your current environment.
Notice we have two components of the stress
response—the person (or organism)—and
the environment. We do have much personal
control over stress, but ultimately we are at
the mercy of our environment and her laws
of nature, unless we do something clever to
change it. For instance, a person can only
do only so much mindfulness meditation for
effective stress control in Fukushima as one’s
DNA is ripped apart or war-torn Iraq, where
one’s clean water infrastructure is destroyed.
Yes stress includes psychological factors, but it
is so much more. It also includes chemical and
physical factors.
So we understand that stress is not just some
abstract construct, is the way we adapt.
It is how humans can adjust themselves
to thrive in a particular environment, and
with it comes costs. We need our biological
stress mechanisms to thrive and successfully
adapt in life. We would have hardly survived
the stress of being born without our stress
response. However, like many things in
nature, there are flip-sides as well, like the
destruction of our collective resistance to
thwart malfeasance.
You might ask what exactly causes stress.
In the modernized world, many decades
of research has told us it comes down to 5
factors:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Loss of working memory ability
Loss of social equality
Loss of social capital
Depletion of friendly bacteria
populations (biome)
5. Chemical exposure, both voluntary and
involuntary
I will cover these individual factors in future
writings, or you can read about it in my book.
Ultimately, thi