Stress: Why It Makes Us Sick

I once read the definition of stress as being when the mind overrides the bodies natural desire to choke the life out of some b******d that seriously deserves it.  Although a joke, it has a lot of truth in it.

The speed of our technological advances and changes in our society have way outstripped our capacity to evolve to keep up with it.  Our bodies still have a lot “caveman” responses.  When we get stressed, our body releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol to prepare us for the fight or flight.  In caveman times this could mean we are being attacked by some big predator wanting us for lunch, or a rival tribe is attacking (without any of today’s social constraints).  Or of course you are running like mad to get away from these.

However, although your mind understands it, you body has trouble understanding that it is being flooded with these fight or flight hormones because you are stuck in a traffic jam.  As much as you may have the desire, you are unable to work it off by smashing somebodies skull as you club wielding ancestors would have happily done without a second thought.  Not that they would have been in a traffic jam.

But you do find that people become restless.  They fidget a lot and thump the steering wheel as a poor substitute for an enemy’s head.  When we are stressed, the best thing we can do is something physical, anything physical, to burn of those stress hormones.

It is well known that stress damages our immune system.  I read years ago that there are 2 main parts to our immune system, the antibodies that kill invading pathogens and the white blood cells that clear out the body of defective or damaged cellular tissue.  When we are stressed and our bodies assume the fight or flight, our bodies also assume that we could have some kind of injury or wound.  As such it gears itself up to fighting infections at the expense of the cleaning out damaged or defective cells.

It follows then that long term stress will lead to our bodies not being cleaned out properly and degenerative diseases taking hold.  Exercise not only burns of the stress hormones, but it produces endorphins which actually boost our immune systems.