Five Words About Stress: Keep It Short And Sweet

Geezer is already stressing out, just trying to figure out how to explain the paradoxical influence of stress on our health. There is, according to this piece in the Washington Post, healthy stress and unhealthy stress, and generally speaking, healthy stress is stress that lasts only a short time. Unhealthy stress, on the other hand, is chronic. All of which appears to make the distinction between good stress and bad stress fairly clear-cut. But of course it’s not that simple. Because the influence of stress also depends on you, the recipient of that stress, and whether you are the kind of person who finds stress energizing or the kind of person who finds it enervating–which of course, depends again on what kind of stress we are talking about.
Despite the frustrating circularity of reasoning, the biochemical machinations of the good stress–bad stress dichotomy are nicely laid out here, thanks largely to a Post interview with a McArthur Foundation "Genius" grant winner and Stanford professor named Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky points out that the short term stress of a roller coaster ride can be invigorating, with improved blood circulation, heightened senses, sharper memory and pleasing chemicals produced by the brain. Under continued stress, however, things get ugly. Neurons shrivel in
the prefrontal cortex, the center of emotion and executive function, and the amygdala, which processes fear and anxiety, grows
neurons, essentially trapping us in a state of fear. At that point, says Sapolsky, the body stops its
repair work, compromising the immune system, and constant pressure on
the cardiovascular system eventually leads to high blood pressure and
heart disease. Read more, and learn how to cope with stress.