x

Stress Research

Scientific Explanations

Here are some definitions:

    * Stress - A dynamic state within the organism in response to a demand for adaptation.
    * Stressor - Any stimulus, which produces a demand for adaptation; may be social, environmental, physical or even psychological.
    * General Adaptation Syndrome - A stereotypic response to stress, which involves vasoregulatory and endocrine mechanisms.

Early Researchers of Stress:

    * Hans Selye, the first major researcher on stress, was able to trace exactly what happens in your body during the fight or flight response. He found that any problem, imagined or real, could cause the cerebral cortex (the thinking part of your brain) to send an alarm to the hypothalamus then stimulates the sympathetic nervous system to make a series of changes in your body. Your heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension, metabolism, and blood pressure all increase. Your hands and feet get cold as blood is directed away from your extremities and digestive system into the larger muscles that can help you fight or run. You experience butterflies in your stomach. Your diaphragm and your anus lock. Your pupils dilate to sharpen your vision and your hearing becomes more acute.
    * While all of this is going on, something else happens that can have long-term negative effects if left unchecked. Your adrenal glands start to secret corticoids, which inhibit digestion, reproduction, growth, and tissue repair and the responses of your immune and inflammatory systems. In other words, some very important functions that keep your body healthy begin to shut down.
    * Hans calls positive stress eustress and negative stress distress. Most of us enjoy a challenge, but we don't enjoy too many of them at once. Too much eustress can easily become distress. Moderation and balance seem to be important for our minds and bodies to cope with the demands of life.
    * Claude Bernard noticed, in his Introduction to Experimental Medicine, that the constancy of the internal milieu was the essential condition to a free life.
    * However it was necessary to find a concept that would make it possible to link together the mechanisms that effected the regulation of the body. The credit for this concept goes to the Walter Cannon, an American physiologist at Harvard.
    * Impressed by the wisdom of the body capable of guaranteeing with such efficiency the control of the physiological equilibrium, Walter Cannon coined the word homeostasis from two Greek words meaning to remain the same. Cannon laid the groundwork for the modern meaning of stress around the turn of the century. He was the first to describe the fight or flight response as a series of biochemical changes that prepare you to deal with threats or danger. Primitive man needed quick bursts of energy to fight or flee such predators as a saber-toothed tiger. These days, when social custom prevents you from fighting or running away, this emergency response is rarely useful.


RELATED PRODUCTS:

Anxiety Relief
$49.00
  • Let go of Stress.
  • Overcome feelings of Fear or Anxiety.
  • Natural Anxiety Relief.