Stress and Chronic Disease
Stress, as defined by the noted endocrinologist, Hans Selye, who pioneered much of the early work on stressors in the 1950’s, is the “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change”. Selye observed by his work on laboratory animals, that acute experiences of trauma, change or psychological frustration would trigger pathological conditions conventionally associated with pathogenic or bodily harm. His theories on stress set the stage for the notion of stress to be linked to a broader definition of what causes health or disease. (1)
Today, we commonly accept stress to be a wide range of definitions, quite possibly because we all experience stress in different ways. Western medicine has accepted stress as a factor in the process of healing, acknowledging that individuals often recover quicker and with more success than patients with no systems in place to cope with stress. We know people are more productive, happier and get sick less often when they are actively supported to reduce their stress. Hence, workplaces, schools, and hospitals are all starting to have wellness resources where people can go to find ways to manage stress in their lives. People are becoming wise to the fact that finding ways to manage and reduce the amount of stress we carry in our bodies is linked to mood, performance, digestion, the immune system, and ultimately, chronic disease.
A key path from stress to chronic disease could be inflammation. Many of the chronic health conditions we see today are regulated by the inflammatory response, and mediated by emotions, diet, outside pathogens or what we now refer to as “stress”. Inflammation is not just a term used for athletes, broken bones, or those who suffer from arthritis anymore. Inflammation is our bodies natural response to stress, from the inside of our gut, to our brains, our hearts, and to the joint in our big toe. Stress, via inflammation, is how our body communicates to our brain that something is changing, both internally and externally. It is an immunological response, linked by intricate and entwined systems of body, mind and spirit that accompanies, to varying degrees, stress. How we are able to cope with stress results in our ability to overcome, heal or prevent chronic conditions. From this view, cardiovascular disease, such as arteriosclerosis and hypertension, can be seen as conditions our main organ of the circulatory system are susceptible to by the vast array of chemical messengers that signal specific reactions within the circulatory system when under conditions of stress. Diabetes can be seen as an immunological response from the body from chronically experiencing stress by inability to release insulin, therefor resulting in elevated blood glucose levels. The response is mediated by inflammation, perhaps from an overload of stress due to a poor diet or lifestyle factors. This can be seen with other auto-immune diseases which are also affected by the body’s ability to balance stress, resulting in diseases which often have no cure and are keep under control by anti-inflammatory drugs.
Inflammation is a necessary function of the body and it is hard to say wether it is an accompaniment to stress or if it is the direct effect of stress. We all have very different reactions to the stress we face and have different psychological, emotional and physical responses to change. This may be a key factor on the impact stress management has on chronic disease conditions. Could yelling at your spouse or having a demanding boss affect when an individual has a heart attack, could fried chicken wings give someone alzheimer’s, or could having a regular meditation practice help control hypertension? While it is common practice by the medical world to advise eating a heathy diet, getting moderate exercise, staying within a healthy weight range and avoiding smoking, the role stress management techniques such as meditation, yoga, and other self-care techniques are harder to provide direct evidence. What is known is that by learning to manage stress, we can help our bodies control the complex system of messages it sends when in a stressful situation- emotionally, physically, and mentally. We can keep our resistance to stressors high by practicing stress management techniques. We all lie somewhere on a spectrum of health; with a critical and dynamic point where we can fall to either good health or ill-health. Learning and experiencing stress management techniques are a way to to stay on the upper spectrum of good health, allowing us to cope with change, reduce inflammation and avoid chronic disease.
1. The American Institute of Stress. accessed September 29, 2012. available at: http://www.stress.org/
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