This is the first of a two part article on Stress, Adaptation, and how we define “Health”. Our first task is to understand exactly what stress is, the forms it comes in, and how it affects our health. As usual, you can enjoy this and other articles, as well as subscribe to this newsletter, at http://www.CollinsDC.com.

Enjoy!

A. Chandler Collins, D.C.

French Fries Count, Too

The Many Faces of Stress and Its Not-So-Subtle Effects

Stress comes in many forms. Most of us understand this intuitively. For example, we know that we feel “stressed” when we have a hard day at work or when we’re carrying a heavy load.

We use the word to describe an intense emotional event, and to convey what is happening to a wooden board bent to the point of breaking.

While the concept seems very natural to all of us, the actual term “stress” hasn’t been around very long. It wasn’t coined until a researcher by the name of Hans Selye came along in the 1950s.

On the other hand, the idea that people and things could be subjected to environmental irritants has been around for a long time. D.D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic, made this observation back in the late 1800s.

Palmer divided these irritants, or forms of stress, into mechanical, chemical, and psychological forms – or what he called “traumatism”, “poison”, and “auto-suggestion”, respectively.

A mechanical stress could be in the form of an uncomfortable pair of shoes worn all day long.

Chemical stress could come from a food allergy or a toxin from unfriendly bacteria.

Psychological stress is perhaps the most well known, and might arise via a fight with your spouse or dealing with an unreasonable boss.

An important thing to understand about all forms of stress is that they’re cumulative. That is, you can’t separate the different varieties of stress and somehow recover from them independently.

If you spend the weekend playing touch football (mechanical stress) and then have a big deadline looming at work early in the week (psychological stress), and as a result of your time crunch at work you scarf down some fast food filled with lots of sugar and hydrogenated fats (chemical stress), then it won’t be any wonder when you’re worn down and sick by Friday!

Selye actually determined this half a century ago, when he would stress lab rats in various ways and then see how their bodies responded. No matter what form the stress, the eventual breakdown always followed the same pattern.

Humans also follow this pattern, and if we don’t make an effort to relieve the various forms of stress placed upon us, we end up sick, injured, or both.

So if various forms of stress can make us sick, then what exactly is health? It is pretty easy for us all to understand that we feel good until mechanical, chemical, and psychological stressors (or “MCP” for short) add up and we break down.

But then what about that point in between, when we have a fair amount of MCP, but we’re not yet sick or injured in any noticeable way (i.e. we don’t have any symptoms)?

That space in between the level of stress we’re currently under, and the level we have where we start experiencing symptoms is called “resistance”.

These ideas are best demonstrated with a stress chart, devised by Dr. John Bandy of Austin, Texas. Take a look:

The chart is read like a thermometer, with our total exposure to environmental stress (or MCP), reflected by the “Now” point on the chart. Various stresses can contribute to our total stress, as already discussed. Anything from marital strife to fatty foods to, yes, exercise, can add to the total level of stress we experience.

The point “D” on the chart is the Disease point. That is the point at which we begin to exhibit symptoms. “R” then, is a graphical representation of resistance. If the next big stress we are subjected to happens to exceed our current supply of resistance (“R”), then we experience symptoms of illness or disease.

At any given point in time we have varying amounts of resistance. It varies within and between individuals based upon how good our diet is, what our job is like, how much exercise we do, whether a loved one recently passed away, and whether we’ve just been exposed to a “bug”, to name a few.

That is, it varies based upon how much MCP we’re experiencing.

So health, then, is that state where we still have some resistance, keeping the level of environmental irritants that we are experiencing from producing symptoms. We are “unhealthy” (or experiencing “disease”), when MCP exceeds our resistance.

From this it follows that any stressor reduces the amount of resistance you have, bringing you closer to a state of disease. These concepts are well described in Dr. W.D. Harper’s book, Anything Can Cause Anything. The title gets to the crux of the idea: just like any expense — be it business or pleasure — will deplete your bank account, so too will any stressor deplete your overall reserve of health.

Next time, we’ll explore these ideas more to understand how we survive and adapt to all the stress that is around us!