Lesson 23 - The Pursuit Of Your Values Creates Stress

“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”
ALBERT EINSTEIN

Stress

The pursuit of your conditioned beliefs creates the values that you use to try to become fulfilled. The key to going through life in the most nurturing way is to reduce your potential stress from this process as much as possible. This section provides stress information, and the following quiz in another lesson will help you measure the level of stress you currently are incurring.

What is stress?

Excess stress can manifest itself in a variety of emotional, behavioral, and even physical symptoms, and the symptoms of stress vary enormously among different individuals.

Stress is a normal part of life that can help us learn and grow or cause significant problems.
Stress releases powerful neurochemicals and hormones that prepare us for action (to fight or flee). If we don’t take action, the stress response can create or worsen health problems.
Prolonged, uninterrupted, unexpected, and unmanageable stresses are the most damaging.
Stress can be managed by seeking support from loved ones, regular exercise, meditation or other relaxation techniques, structured timeouts, and learning new coping strategies to create predictability.
Many behaviors that increase in times of stress and maladaptive ways of coping with stress—drugs, pain medicines, alcohol, smoking, and eating—worsen the stress and can make us more reactive (sensitive) to stress further.
Risk factors for unmanageable stress include a lack of adequate social support.
While promising treatments for stress exist, stress management mostly depends on a person’s ability and willingness to make the changes necessary for a healthy lifestyle.

What causes stress?

Stress is a fact of nature in which forces from the inside or outside world affect you, either through your emotional or physical well-being or both. You respond to stress in ways that affect you and your environment. Due to the overabundance of stress in our modern lives, we usually think of stress as a negative experience. Still, from a biological point of view, stress can be a neutral, harmful, or positive experience.

In general, stress is related to both external and internal factors. External factors include the physical environment, including your job, relationships with others, home, and all the situations, challenges, difficulties, and expectations you’re confronted with daily. Internal factors determine your body’s ability to respond to and deal with external stress-inducing factors. Internal factors influencing your ability to handle stress include your nutritional status, overall health and fitness levels, emotional well-being, and the amount of sleep and rest you get.

Stress has driven evolutionary change (species’ development and natural selection over time). Thus, the species that adapted best to the causes of stress (stressors) have survived and evolved into the plant and animal kingdoms we now observe.

Man is the most adaptive creature on the planet because of the evolution of the human brain; especially the part called the neocortex. This adaptability is largely due to the changes and stressors we have faced and mastered. Therefore, we, unlike other animals, can live in any climate or ecosystem at various altitudes and avoid the danger of predators. Moreover, we have learned to live in the air, under the sea, and even in space, where no living creatures have ever survived. So then, what is so bad about stress?

What are the signs and symptoms of poorly managed stress?

Excess stress can manifest itself in a variety of emotional, behavioral, and even physical symptoms, and the symptoms of stress vary enormously among different individuals.

Common somatic (physical) symptoms often reported by those experiencing excess stress include

sleep disturbances or changes in sleeping habits (insomnia or sleeping too much),
muscle tension,
muscle aches,
headache, gastrointestinal problems, and
fatigue.

Symptoms of many preexisting medical conditions can also worsen during times of stress. Emotional and behavioral symptoms that can accompany excess stress include

nervousness,
anxiety,
changes in eating habits, including overeating or undereating (leading to weight gain or loss),
loss of enthusiasm or energy, and
mood changes, like irritability and depression.

Of course, none of these signs or symptoms guarantees an elevated stress level since all can be caused by other medical and/or psychological conditions.

It is also known that people under stress have a greater tendency to engage in unhealthy behaviors, such as excessive use or abuse of alcohol and drugs, cigarette smoking, and poor exercise and nutritional choices, than their less-stressed counterparts. These unhealthy behaviors can further increase the severity of symptoms related to stress, often leading to a “vicious cycle” of symptoms and harmful behaviors.

The experience of stress is highly individualized. What constitutes overwhelming stress for one person may not be perceived as stress by another. Likewise, the symptoms and signs of poorly managed stress will differ for each person.

Who is most vulnerable to stress? What are the risk factors for stress?

Stress comes in many forms and affects people of all ages and all walks of life. No external standards can be applied to predict stress levels in individuals — you need not have a traditionally stressful job to experience workplace stress, just as a parent of one child may experience more parenting stress than a parent of several children. The degree of stress in your life is highly dependent upon individual factors such as your physical health, the quality of your interpersonal relationships, the number of commitments and responsibilities you carry, the degree of others’ dependence upon us, expectations of us, the amount of support we receive from others, and the number of changes or traumatic events that have recently occurred in our lives.

However, it is possible to make some generalizations. People with adequate or robust social support networks report less stress and improved mental health than those without adequate social support. People who are poorly nourished, who get inadequate sleep, or who are physically unwell also have a reduced capacity to handle the pressures and stresses of everyday life and may report higher stress levels. Some stressors are particularly associated with certain age groups or life stages. Children, teens, newly married, working parents, single parents, and seniors often face everyday stressors related to life transitions.

What is the healthy response to stress?

The time is crucial to a healthy adaptational response to stress. Responses must be initiated rapidly, maintained for a proper amount of time, and then turned off to ensure an optimal result. An over-response to stress or the failure to shut off a stress response can have adverse biological and mental health consequences for an individual. Healthy human reactions to stress involve three components:

The brain handles (mediates) the immediate response. This response signals the adrenal medulla to release epinephrine and norepinephrine.
The hypothalamus (a central area in the brain) and the pituitary gland initiate (trigger) the slower maintenance response by signaling the adrenal cortex to release cortisol and other hormones.
Many neural (nerve) circuits are involved in the behavioral response. This response increases arousal (alertness, heightened awareness), focuses attention, inhibits feeding and reproductive behavior, reduces pain perception, and redirects behavior.

The combined results of these three stress response components maintain the internal balance (homeostasis) and optimize energy production and utilization. They also gear up the organism for a quick reaction through the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). The SNS operates by increasing the heart rate, increasing blood pressure, redirecting blood flow to the heart, muscles, and brain and away from the gastrointestinal tract, and releasing fuel (glucose and fatty acids) to help fight or flee the danger.

How does your body respond to stress?

While the complete story is not fully known, scientists understand much about how the response to stress works. The two central systems involved are the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). Triggered (activated) primarily by an area in the brain stem (lowest part of the brain) called the locus coeruleus, the SNS produces epinephrine and norepinephrine. The following are the five most important concepts to remember about these two systems:

A feedback loop governs them to regulate their response. (In a feedback loop, increased amounts of a substance—for example, a hormone—inhibit the release of more of that substance, while decreased amounts stimulate the release of more.)
They interact with each other.
They influence other brain systems and functions.
Genetic (inherited) variability affects the responses of both systems. (Different people can respond differently to similar stresses depending on their genes.)
Prolonged or overwhelming responses to these systems can be harmful to an individual.

How does stress impact overall health?

Uncontrollable, unpredictable, and constant stress has far-reaching consequences on our physical and mental health. Stress can begin in the womb and recur throughout life. One of the potential pathological (abnormal) consequences of stress is a learned helplessness that leads to the hopelessness and helplessness of clinical depression. Still, in addition, many illnesses, such as chronic anxiety states, high blood pressure, heart disease, and addictive disorders, to name a few, also seem to be influenced by chronic or overwhelming stress.

Nature, however, has provided us with efficient processes (mechanisms) to cope with stressors through the HPA axis and the locus coeruleus/sympathetic nervous system. Furthermore, research has shown us the biological processes that explain what we all intuitively know is true—that too much stress, particularly when we cannot predict or control its recurrence, harms our health.