The Body, Mind, and Stress: Understanding the Interconnectedness of Health
We attempt to understand the body in isolation from the mind. We want to describe human beings- -healthy or otherwise as though they function in isolation from the environment in which they develop, live, work, play, love and die.
The more specialized doctors become, the more they know about a body part or organ and the less they tend to understand the human being in whom that part or organ resides.
Our immune system does not exist in isolation from daily experience. For example, the immune defenses that normally function in healthy young people have been shown to be suppressed in medical students under the pressure of final examinations. Of even greater implication for their future health and well-being, the loneliest students suffered the greatest negative impact on their immune systems.
The pressure of examinations is obvious and short term, but many people unwittingly spend their entire lives as if under the gaze of a powerful and judgmental examiner whom they must please at all costs. Many of us live, if not alone, then in emotionally inadequate relationships that do not recognize or honor our deepest needs.
Isolation and stress affect many who may believe their lives are quite satisfactory.
Stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence-and are influenced by the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defenses and the workings of the many circulating biological substances that help govern the body's physical states.
Repression-dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm-disorganized and confuses our physiological defenses so that in some people these defenses go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors.
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It is a sensitive matter to raise the possibility that the way people have been conditioned to live their lives may contribute to their illness. The connections between behavior and subsequent disease are obvious in the case of, say, smoking and lung cancer-_ except perhaps to tobacco-industry executives. But such links are harder to prove when it comes to emotions and the emergence of multiple sclerosis or cancer of the breast or arthritis.
Multiple sclerosis (from the Greek, "to harden") is the most common of the so-called demyelinating diseases that impair the functioning of cells in the central nervous system. Its symptoms depend on where the inflammation and scarring occur. The main areas attacked are usually the spinal cord, the brain stem and the optic nerve, which is the bundle of nerve fibres carrying visual information to the brain. If the site of damage is somewhere in the spinal cord, the symptoms will be numbness, pain or other unpleasant sensations in the limbs or trunk. There may also be involuntary tightening of the muscles or weakness. In the lower part of the brain, the loss of myelin can induce double vision or problems with speech or balance. Patients with optic neuritis--inflammation of the optic nerve suffer temporary visual loss. Fatigue is a common symptom, a sense of overwhelming exhaustion far beyond ordinary tiredness.
For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. People may become addicted to their own stress hormones, adrenaline, and cortisol, Hans Selye observed. To such persons stress feels desirable, while the absence of it feels like something to be avoided.
When people describe themselves as being stressed, they usually mean the nervous agitation they experience under excessive demands most commonly in the areas of work, family, relationships, finances or health. But sensations of nervous tension do not define stress- nor, strictly speaking, are they always perceived when people are stressed. Stress, as we will define it, is not a matter of subjective feeling. It is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body, involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system and many other organs. Both animals and people can experience stress with no awareness of its presence.
The lining of the esophagus is not designed to withstand the corrosive bath of hydrochloric acid secreted in the stomach. A muscular valve between the two organs and complex neurological mechanisms ensure that food can move downward from throat to stomach without permitting acid to flow back upward. Chronic reflux can damage the surface of the lower esophagus, predisposing it to malignant change.
Source : When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté