We hear it all the time. ‘Too much stress.’ ‘I’m under so much stress.’ ‘Stop stressing me out!’ Stress has been equated with all those bad things that happen to us, when we grind our teeth, or stomach does back flips and our head and neck hurts. But stress is also all those wonderful things that happen to us. That really great dinner; you ate everything in sight. The jackpot you won at the casino. Getting married, having a baby, these too are stressful situations even if the outcome is positive.

Dr. Hans Selye, the Einstein of medicine, defined stress as the non-specific response of the body to any demand. What does that mean? It means that stress, while neither good or bad is simply the body’s reaction to something. When it’s a good something, you feel great. When it is not good, you go from feeling bad or sad or mad to worse, to sick and eventually possibly death.

The kind of stress we need to avoid is the ‘bad stress’. In order to do that, we need to know what things we will react badly to. These are known as ‘stressors’. For many children today, peanuts cause a strong negative reaction known as anaphylaxis, which can lead to death. The allergic reaction to peanuts is the stress, the peanut is the stressor and should be avoided or overcome.

How We React To Stressors

According to Selye, the body has three reaction phases, Alarm, Adaptation, and Exhaustion. Think of the Alarm Phase as a little child touching a hot stove. The reaction is strong (OUCH!) and the child has learned this is definitely something to be avoided. But what if we kept touching the stove? Eventually we would no longer feel the pain of the heat, we would adapt. We would still be burned, but we would no longer know it. The next stage is exhaustion. The burn is serious now, the body can no longer adapt. The pain you stopped feeling comes back screaming. You are in serious trouble; you need help now.

Did You Know?

• Pain, rashes, spider veins – all these ‘symptoms’ are your body’s way of communicating with you.
• Taking aspirin for a headache may stop the headache but not the problem
• Feeling ‘fine’ may mask a problem ignored at the ‘alarm’ stage. Adapting and having no symptoms does not mean you are not reacting to negative stressors.
• Stress has been identified as the leading cause of death in North America.
• Stress has been linked to cancer, diabetes, heart disease and even premature aging.
• Within our world today there are so many unknown stressors afflicting our body we have no chance of adapting quickly enough