You are caught in a traffic jam. No big guess. You have an important meeting lined up. No real surprise. Welcome to the stress labyrinth — an inevitable part of our life and existence.
Stress is more than just a warped logjam. It has biotic and functional nitty-gritties and psychosomatic outcomes. It changes the way we perceive the world, our senses, memory, judgment and behaviour.
Most of the biological alterations that occur with the stress reaction are intended to jazz-up the body’s fuel depots — for instant use. This includes extra oxygen required for the organs most likely to need it — the brain and muscles.
Act 1. Scene 1. Your pulse, blood pressure and breathing rate surge — to help increase the stream of available energy. Your heart, as you’d know, beats faster under stress and pumps a greater quantity of blood with each beat. Your bronchial tubes dilate to assist the passage for more air with each breath. The blood vessels supplying the muscles expand just as well. Your palms and soles begin to naturally fill up with sweat, or perspiration, more so because a moist surface offers a much better ‘grip’ of things. In like manner, the pupils of your eyes dilate to let in more light and improve your vision. What next? Your cerebral awareness and response time are amplified.
Act 2. Scene 1. When things go beyond one’s control, the whole effect impacts the parasympathetic nervous system. It leads to involuntary urination — like rushing to the washroom — and, also passing stools. This isn’t all. During a stressful episode, long-term energy reserves, such as stored fat, are broken down into fatty acids and glycerol to be metabolised, pronto. Carbohydrates, ‘stockpiled’ in the liver, are, likewise, converted to glucose, as blood is thrust into the heart, muscles and brain.
This, in effect, leads to the closing down of energy-consuming progressions, including salivation. The result is a dry mouth, loss of appetite and distressed bowels. It is chaos, all right. Yet, stress, to its core, is evidenced to provide the boost to your general level of arousal and awareness — to make you more responsive to signals from your sensory organs and less open to information that is of no instant concern. For example, in times of severe stress, an itch, or a runny nose, will not distract your attention.
When your brain decides — consciously, or unconsciously — that all is not well, the hypothalamus is activated. The hypothalamus is the ‘seat’ of several electrical and chemical signals that trigger stress responses in our body. During the preliminary phase of a stress response the hypothalamus stimulates the nerve endings in the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal glands — this causes them to release two hormones, noradrenaline and adrenaline. A slightly stressful activity, viz., public speaking may, by and large, bring forth a 50 per cent surplus in noradrenaline. People having chronic stress, or anxiety, tend to have a much higher, or persistently elevated, levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline, as also cortisol.
Stress is our mariner’s compass — it informs us of changes in our normal routine, or health. It also gives us the cautionary pointer before ‘bad’ things occur. Similarly, it indicates good and happy tidings. Picture this. The anticipation of getting a raise, or promotion, is stressful; so also being ‘fired’ from the job.
Stress is evidenced to be one of the contributing factors for loss of emotional equilibrium, backache, sleeplessness, or insomnia, eating disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome [CFS], absence of menstruation [amenorrhoea], abnormal bleeding, fibroid tumours and cancer. Heart disease and diabetes are also stress-related. While some women experience changes in their sexuality and face certain sexual dysfunctions, such as loss of desire and vaginal dryness, because of stress, there are several others [men and women] who often feel the rebounding effects of stress — this includes headache and migraine, anxiety, depression and sleep issues, aside from lack of libido and fertility problems.
Stress can trigger gastrointestinal disorders, including ulcers, abdominal cramps, colitis and irritable bowel syndrome [IBS]. What’s more, it is not uncommon for people with severe stress to be subject to frequent colds, allergies, or infections, thanks to reduced immune system reaction time, or function. As a matter of fact, stress can set off certain skin problems, such as itching and rashes, as well as atopic dermatitis [eczema] and psoriasis.
Not all stresses are stressful, or negative. If one deals with stress effectively, it can work and help us to reach our goals more quickly. This is aptly called ‘good’ stress, or ‘eustress’ — it encourages and drives us to do well in life. Eustress can be defined as pleasant, also therapeutic stress. We can’t always circumvent stress, but we tend to, at times. It is such ‘controlled’ stress that gives us the big ‘push’ in performance-related activities, such as sports, job interview, public speaking, or acting. You’d call them ‘motivating’ stress too — one that provides us with focus and ‘pumps’ us up with that famed competitive edge, while stirring us to think quickly, clearly and express our thoughts in ways that could amplify the whole process.
In a study, a team of scientists found that our genetic make-up may be ‘rewired,’ courtesy of stress. The study found that a complex network of 160,000 genetic interactions in yeast cells, to highlight a fascinating corollary, or captivating paradigm, changed when subjected to stress. It also figured out that ‘rewiring’ was widespread. As a matter of fact, 70 per cent of the genetic interactions that happened when cells were under stress did not occur in normal cells. This could be a novel paradigm to ‘swot’ not only biological responses to stress, but also apply them to evaluating how cells deal with stress, illness and medical treatment. This isn’t all. The ‘information exchange’ could shed new light on how our cells actually work under stress too.
— First published in The Himalayan Times, Nepal
