The Biology of Stress
In discussing the historical context of stress, Hans Selye’s now infamous letter to the magazine Nature in 1936 has to be mentioned. Selye was a widely respected endocrinologist and pathologist who some called the “Einstein of medical research.”
Selye’s letter discussed the physical manifestations that had been observed in the body in response to stress:
enlarged adrenal glands,
lipid discharge from the adrenals, and
gastric ulcers in the digestive system.
This little story took up less than a full page in the magazine, yet was considered historic. Why? Because it was the first ever scientific recognition of the then novel idea that stress might have an actual physical effect the body, the whole notion of biological stress as yet unfathomed until then, or at least unstudied. The reality of biological stress was something Selye believed to be hugely important. As he noted,
“Stress in health and disease is medically, sociologically, and philosophically the most meaningful subject for humanity that I can think of.”
The paper opened the door for a wave of medical research into the subject of stress and how it manifests physiologically in the body, both short- and long-term. The general adaptation syndrome or stress response, as Selye came to call it, recognized not just the existence of immediate biological stress but stress as something capable of causing lasting physical consequences, in all areas of the body — his definition for the stress response at first being “the non-specific neuroendocrine response of the body” after which he quickly discarded the word neuroendocrine, recognizing that almost every other system of the body was involved.
Duh right? It’s no surprise to anyone that stress can take physical shape. It probably wasn’t a surprise in 1936 either; it might have just been the first time someone was able to find a way to prove it in a way that resonated with science, a field mainly distrusting of the types of things you can’t see with your eyes. Anyone who has experienced a panic attack, butterflies in the stomach, a tension headache, or restless leg syndrome — in other words, most people on planet earth — could argue the inherent truth of biological stress from their own lived experience.
But could stress really cause conditions more far off, more serious than that, like disease?
Yes, actually. One person who thinks so is a psychology professor Sheldon Cohen. Cohen conducts research at Carnegie Mellon and has taken up Selye’s mantle in the study of biological stress for the past 30+ years, recently (in 2012) drawing conclusions that chronic psychological stress can cause the body to lose the ability to regulate the inflammatory response, and that “the effects of psychological stress on the body's ability to regulate inflammation can promote the development and progression of disease." Cohen and his team have since concluded that particular conditions like depression, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, peptic ulcers, irritable bowel, and diabetes are among the most connected to chronic states of stress.
This simple concept is one many people have heard by now, but is revolutionary in that it provides a basis for understanding a major potential source, or contributing factor, to many chronic conditions.
Was Selye Woo Woo, or Just Smart?
But what’s most interesting to me about Selye’s feelings on stress were his assertions about the solutions for it:
Close study of nature — as Jackson (2012) explained, “close study of nature was something Selye argued would allow people to derive some general philosophic lesson, some natural rules of conduct, in the permanent fight between altruistic and egotistic tendencies, which account for most of the stress in interpersonal relations.”
Collective survival, interpersonal altruism, and mutual interdependence
A fulfilled need for self-expression
A life not marred or cut short by the stresses of senseless struggles
"Ultimately striving for, and dispensing, a feeling of gratitude.”
What now? Could this be an Einstein-level scientist proposing in 1936 that the solution for stress was paying attention to nature, group interdependence, self-expression (art therapy!), gratitude, and a life that isn’t weight down by senseless struggles? It’s not like these types of solutions haven’t been figured out by countless spiritualists and others over the years, but this was a MAN OF SCIENCE over 80 years ago, arguing for a lot of the practices being used in alternative medicine today that much of mainstream medicine continues to see as froo froo. Not to go down THAT road, but just saying.
The Inequity of Stress
As Nelson (2013) writes: “we endure a stressor, we take time to recover (provided we are healthy enough) and we end up on the other side, better than we were before.” This is the definition of resilience, or actually, of antifragility, which I write about next. It doesn’t always work that way, of course, but this is the goal, the ideal, given all the right circumstances.
The issue with this conclusion is that the solution isn’t always so easy. Not everyone has the luxury of curating a life free of stress — this is the problem I have with some healing movements presenting a polished, sunlit image of health that has a way of equating directly with wealth. I think it’s important to point out that stress-related disease is a health inequity issue for many who are marginalized and underserved, facing chronic stressors such as housing instability and systemic discrimination that can’t be fixed with a morning sun salutation and a $9 green juice — that any hope in helping those who need it most demands a rethinking of what can realistically be done for those among us suffering the most.
In health policy and elsewhere, these inequities are considered components of social determinants of health which are known to have huge effects on quality of life, physical health, and emotional wellbeing.
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Where the presence of a chronic stressor isn’t a circumstance that can be eliminated, what can be done? Not to write a totally socialist manifesto, but this is one way socialism gets to the heart of this problem by literally sharing the wealth. This idea has been proven by efforts like like “Mincome,” a guaranteed minimal income experiment in Canada in the 1970s that gave money to low-income residents, leading to a decline in hospitalization rates, consultations for mental health diagnoses, and school dropouts, and other studies showing that low income people when given a little more money tend to spend it wisely.
“While everyone seems to have advice for the poor on how to live, evidence shows that, given a little more money, they make choices that promote their families’ well-being. As good medical practice involves trusting patients’ wisdom about their own bodies, good social policy should respect the wisdom of our neighbors about their lives.”
If we can find ways of eliminating senseless struggles — housing, healthcare, and financial instabilities, for instance, by nature senseless in a society with plenty to go around, if resources are ethically allocated — by using such practices that Selye proposed so long ago, like fostering group interdependence in communities, increasing access to natural environments, building opportunity and time for self-expression, and showing gratitude for one another as we go about collective survival, we just might help to decrease the chronic stress and the conditions that derive out of it — preventive care at its best is this big, and this inclusive.
The Gut of Stress
In recognizing the many systems of the body involved in the stress response, Selye made some interesting connections between stress and the digestive system — such as the formation of acute erosions he noted in the digestive tract following stress and alarm, an early description of what’s now commonly called leaky gut. In speaking of this, he described the stress response as most closely resembling a histamine toxicity reaction — symptoms of which include nausea, abdominal cramps, and diarrhea, early descriptions of symptoms that now fall under irritable bowel.
Add to this that when stressful events occur, the body reacts by pumping adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream. Cortisol regulates blood sugar and also has the important job of turning off inflammation. But with chronic stress, not only is blood sugar not properly regulated (exacerbating cravings, causing energy crashes, etc), but cells and tissues become desensitized to cortisol, another resistance that can, in Cohen’s words, “cause inflammation to go wild," a prolonged state of which “damages blood vessels and brain cells, leads to insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes) and promotes painful joint diseases.”
We now also know that the excess of cortisol also leads to an increase in a neurotransmitter called glutamate, and that excess glutamate creates free radicals that attack brain cells in much the same way that excess oxygen causes metal to rust — now a known comorbidity of leaky gut, aptly called leaky brain.
The Cycle of Stress
These things have a way of exacerbating themselves, making pinpointing a single source difficult — for instance, stress can also increase cravings for refined sugar and carbs because the energy it takes to process the response to stress can use up such massive amounts of glucose that need to be replenished for the body to go on functioning — unfortunately high intakes of these can unleash little proteins called cytokines, which also (sad trombone…) trigger inflammation.
This can become an unfortunate cycle, ie:
chronic stress → chronic cravings for/intake of sweets and refined foods +/or chronic inflammation
→ insulin resistance, cortisol resistance, and impaired ability to process sugar +/or inflammatory conditions
→ more chronic stress (now brought to you its own symptoms)
…and ♺
🤯
The Electricity of Stress
The human body is essentially an energetic mass that acts as an electrical conductor, like a complex lightning rod. Like I wrote about in the previous post, our cells are specialized to conduct electrical currents. Electricity is required for the nervous system to send signals throughout the body and brain, making it possible for us to move, think, and feel.
As far as electricity is concerned our bodies have basically a very low conductivity most of the time, putting out about 100 watts of power while at rest, about the same as a ceiling fan. For short periods, like a few hours of jogging, we can be using up to 300-400 watts, like a blender on medium — and in the case of very short bursts of energy, like sprinting, we can get up to a full 2,000 watts.
But then there’s nervous energy — electricity without an outlet. We now know that stress causes the electrical activity in the brain, creating excesses of beta waves that cause anxiety and insomnia, weakens memory, heightens emotion, and fortifies the area of your brain called the amygdala — the brain’s fear center. Nervous energy also increases activity in the nervous and cardiovascular systems, causing increased heart rate and agitation.
This is My Brain on Stress
I am writing this piece of the post in the midst of a full-on panic attack. I won’t go into the details, but it’s about a missed deadline, something probably most people (except the extremely responsible — please teach me your ways) can relate to.
After I pour my energy into sending out an electronic panic attack of messages explaining the oversight and requesting an extension, I get up and, it being midnight and an inappropriate time for any hysterical phone calls, have done all I can do for the moment. Fresh out of distractions and left only with my panic, I begin to breathe quick shallow breaths, dramatically throw off my sweater, and begin the spiral of self loathing.
As I react I know what it happening in my body: My adrenal glands are enlarging and releasing lipids, some of which are a form of lipid called steroids which carry steroid hormones cortisol and adrenaline, produced in the zona fasciculata of the adrenal cortex, electrified into being by my stress. Yes, THIS IS A NERD REPORTING. But, this is helping! So, I’ll keep going.
I know that increasing perspiration is a stress response that causes the body’s water to be eliminated through the skin rather than through the kidneys — so that you don’t have to stop to pee in the midst of defending yourself from or escaping harm. This would be helpful if this stressor was a tiger and not a deadline. I know that another stress response is increased respiration and heart rate, meant to shunt blood and oxygen to the parts more necessary for emergency action, and away from those that aren’t, which both cause the body's temperature to increase.
I also know that a second reason for increased perspiration is to help cool the body down, and that all of these are reasons for my shallow breathing, instant sweating, and dramatic sweater removal. I know that the extra beta waves and adrenaline are what’s put me in a heightened state of emotion with thoughts moving through my head like cars on a freeway. And I know that the activated amygdala is why I feel like my life will literally be over if I don’t get an extension.
This is how a stressor can becomes an energetic force — an actual source of electricity.
The Invisibility of Stress
Moving on — the extension was granted, if you care to know! — let’s go for a second to the truly tiny, unseen world of stress.
It’s true, stress can affect our bodies — we have all experienced this. But what may not be known is that stress can effect us on a cellular level, in ways that can’t be acutely felt. For instance, a temperature increase of a few degrees can cause cell proteins to unravel, stop functioning, and potentially kill the cell. Stress can also cause the shortening of telomeres, the caps on the ends of chromosomes (sometimes likened to the ends of shoelaces), causing cells to age and die prematurely and potentially contributing to associated conditions like arthritis, hypertension, and diabetes. In the worst case scenario, a cell may switch from a protective response to a pathway called apoptosis, essentially turning it to a bomb that self-destructs.
The body is a wonderful, complex, super smart machine, but it does have some unfortunate design drawbacks. For one, whether a stressor is a real and present danger or not, it’s often perceived the same way by the body’s central nervous system, so the response is inherently the same — basically all the things I’ve described above happen whether you’re facing a tiger or a deadline. But what we’re talking about here is not the one-time scenarios, like a single missed deadline, but the prolonged stress of things like financial hardships, demanding jobs, long-term traumas, the pressure of providing for a family, etc — the invisible, but present tigers lurking in the shadows of the mind and our cells quietly responding without our notice until things get to a tipping point.
IN CLOSING…
So, we know now many parts of the stress equation. But how do we get to the beginning? Like a contaminated river, the best place to start is not downstream where the fish are dying, but at the source. The source will be unique for every person, so person-centered care that considers this is essential.
On top of that, we need to keep fighting for policies that spread resources like housing and healthcare accessibility and proper minimum wage — lacks of these are true contaminants that unfairly make the most vulnerable populations more prone to illness, and we must stand up to this for the sake of those who need it.
If you’re feeling stressed, I would love to meet with you and help you get to the source. Check out my APPOINTMENTS page here.