Time Magazine ran a cover story last week that has raised a few eyebrows in the Health and Wellness community. John Cloud's “The Myth About Exercise: How exercise really won’t make you lose weight. It’s what you eat that counts.” has caused a bit of commotion over at The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and author and fitness instructor Joan Pagano has issued a rebuttal.
By Edd Hanzelik, M.D.
Can human beings adapt to chronic stress?
Sorry, here’s the bad news: nothing, absolutely nothing, in the human body or mind is capable of adapting to chronic stress.
Instead a major chemical imbalance is created that interferes with the normal functioning of every system in the body, including the immune system, digestion, reproduction, breathing, blood pressure, skin, bones and many more. This imbalance
Decreasing stress does improve health. Illnesses are easier to treat. Since illnesses generally have other roots besides stress, relieving the stress alone may not cure most of them, but will help to bring about the cure. We turn to specific activities to improve our health and prevent disease, including better nutrition, exercise, good sleep, avoiding harmful substances, and regular medical checkups. In our experience, reducing and avoiding stress will affect each of these factors, and it is as important as any of them in avoiding disease and promoting healing.
Q&A: What happens in the body when we experience stress?
The brain perceives a threat and alerts the amygdala or the hippocampus, which along with the hypothalamus arouses the sympathetic nervous system, the pituitary gland, and the adrenal glands (located on top of the kidneys). The net effect is the production of the basic stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisone.
Stress clearly opens the door to many illnesses, but no single disease has been proven to be caused solely by stress. The direct effects of the stress system—to raise the pulse, blood pressure, and blood sugar—can bring on or worsen hypertension, diabetes, arrhythmias, and heart conditions in susceptible people. Cortisone antagonizes insulin, which worsens the metabolic syndrome, leading to weight gain, high cholesterol, and heart disease. Many digestive diseases can be triggered by stress, including irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, ulcers, and acid reflux. The suppression of the immune system by stress makes you more susceptible to infections, even the common cold, and interferes with normal healing.
For the most part, we are not talking about truly life- threatening situations as catalysts for the stress response in humans. Most of our worst fear, frustration, and pain is evoked by the internal Stress Maker, and fleeing, fighting, and freezing do not help.
The field of neurobiology is helping to provide a more in- depth understanding of the human brain and the mind. The functions of the middle prefrontal cortex of the brain, described by Daniel Siegel in The Mindful Brain, include bodily regulation (balancing the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems), attuned communication (coordinating input from your mind with another’s), emotional balance, response flexibility (the ability to pause before action—the root of the STOP tool), empathy (the root of the Transpose tool), insight (self- knowing awareness), fear modulation, intuition (processing deep ways of knowing), and morality (what is best for the whole and not just for oneself). These brain centers have been observed to maintain their ability to grow until the very end of life.
Your brain unconsciously interprets many simple situations as threats to your existence—such as a disagreement with a spouse, a misbehaving child, a non functioning piece of equipment, a time commitment, even thoughts about yourself or anything else. All of these stressors can initiate the same stress response that animals depend on to survive life- threatening attacks. Humans usually don’t fight or run, so the chronic activation of the stress system leads to an accumulation of the stress hormones, which causes the basic function of health maintenance to be placed on hold.
Chronic stress can affect any aspect of the body. Common symptoms include tense muscles, especially at the base of the neck, digestive disturbances, headaches, menstrual irregularity, palpitations, chest pain, irritability, decreased sexual performance, impaired thinking, skin rashes, sleep disturbances, and fatigue. Stress can also make any underlying condition worse, including diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, infections, and many more. Also, people experiencing stress have a tendency to neglect care of themselves, which also intensifies these symptoms.
There has been a great deal of interesting research that shows the necessity of love—one of the primary inner resources. Rene Spitz, a French pediatrician, made an important observation when he was called to consult at an orphanage in France at the end of World War II where children were dying in the first year of life. The orphanage wanted Dr. Spitz to find the infectious agent that was causing the deaths, but he could not find one. In fact, the hygiene of the infants was good. However, Dr. Spitz did notice that none of the children were being held and played with by any of the caretakers. Everything was task- oriented. When Dr. Spitz asked the caretakers to express love and play with the infants, the deaths stopped occurring.
