Stress: What It Actually Is and Why Everyone Has It

What is Stress

When we talk about stress we can be referring to two things: a stressor (the cause of stress) or the stress response (the reaction to the stressor).

A stressor is usually an imminent danger to our safety. The perception of danger triggers the stress response — the mobilization of energy and the organization of body systems to provide the best physical and mental condition for facing the stressor.

This specific stress response can be called fear. Fear is an emotion, an automatic and primitive state of alarm resulting from a cognitive appraisal of a present danger or threat.

If it's primitive, it means it has accompanied us throughout human evolution; if it's automatic, then it's involuntary; and if it's cognitive, it's influenced by thoughts.

It's precisely cognition that differentiates the emotion of fear between animals and humans. When an animal feels fear, it's fighting for its life — either fleeing from a predator or trying to catch prey. One thing is certain: it's a short-lived event. We are special — we can be in that exact same state of alarm while sitting at home watching television. We don't need to be standing in front of a lion to be under stress; all we need are thoughts about things that are unpredictable and uncontrollable and that may threaten our interests.

For us, a stressor isn't a lion — it's basically anything perceived as aversive, whether it's a lion, a mortgage, public speaking, a job interview, or even events in the distant future, like the fact that one day we're all going to die.
When the activation of the stress response helps us avoid danger, it's adaptive — it worked the way it evolved to work. When constantly exposed to stressors, the same response is activated in our body and we can become more sensitive to potential danger, leading us to be always on alert, even in the absence of stressors — we feel anxiety. On the other hand, things like thoughts, or even common situations — wanting something we can't have, putting up with an idiot boss, feeling inferior to others, having too many demands to meet, among other things — perpetuate the experience of stress. From this, a series of problems can arise, precisely from keeping the stress response active for too long, such as ulcers, cholesterol, high blood pressure, depression, etc.

In this first part I've talked about emotional states, mainly fear and anxiety, as stress. Indeed, anxiety and stress are terms often used to refer to the same state of tension and internal pressure. They are in fact similar, but there are important differences to highlight. While all emotions are stress, not all stress is emotion. Stress is a disturbance of the body's general equilibrium. Certain specific disturbances of this bodily equilibrium constitute emotions. But sometimes a disturbance of equilibrium can just be an itchy scalp, or a lack of water in the body — all of this is stress (more or less depending on the situation), but these are not emotional states.

2 - The Stress Response

When a mammal is under stress, it's usually hunting or fleeing — in both cases it needs to run fast to escape or catch its prey. As descendants of mammals, the same happens with us: the stress response is precisely the process of directing more energy to the muscles.

In the brain, an area called the hypothalamus controls the release of hormones produced by the body's various hormonal glands. In the stress response, two hormones are essentially released: adrenaline and glucocorticoids (cortisol). The first is activated immediately while the second has a more regulatory function, allowing the response to be modulated so it stays active for longer. The secretion of adrenaline is the spark that kicks off a series of bodily procedures and changes. Glucose (carbohydrates) is mobilized from fat-storing cells to energize the muscles needed for survival. So that these nutrients, along with oxygen, reach their destination quickly, heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate all increase. We become less sensitive to pain, and certain aspects of cognition and sensory danger-detection abilities become sharper. Simultaneously, to avoid wasting energy, all non-essential functions are shut down: the digestive, growth, immune, and reproductive systems.

3 - The Impact of Stress

When adrenaline is secreted it reaches the bloodstream in roughly 15 seconds and takes just seconds to disappear. The second hormone, glucocorticoid, takes minutes to hours to reach the bloodstream and, likewise, hours to disappear. Reflecting on this, it's no wonder we use the expression "I've been stressed."
Adrenaline inhibits the digestive system (e.g., your mouth goes dry when you're nervous), but glucocorticoid stimulates appetite, especially for sweets and carbohydrates (e.g., all those movies where people attack tubs of ice cream after a breakup) — and in fact, glucocorticoid levels (stress) drop faster after eating.

Consider the following example: a person who isn't always in a stress response, but who faces several stressful situations throughout the day. The adrenaline comes and goes with each stressor, but the glucocorticoid is always present in the body — so they're always under stress, with a heightened appetite, except in those moments when the body secretes adrenaline.

Stress also affects the digestive system in another way — irritable bowel syndrome. Strong chronic stressors considerably increase the risk of developing initial symptoms and worsening pre-existing ones. There are also duodenal ulcers, caused by the presence of a bacterium in conjunction with episodes of severe stress or chronic stress.

Pregnant women under prolonged stress will introduce glucocorticoids into the child's system, contributing to the development of anxiety in the child. The child will come to secrete elevated levels of glucocorticoids, even in response to minor stressors.

The presence of elevated glucocorticoid levels in children also decreases testosterone production, causing male children to reach puberty later and become adults with low sexual appetite and less developed genitalia. There are also extremely rare cases where the person never reaches puberty (psychogenic dwarfism) — this is the case of the author who wrote Peter Pan. It's speculated that this can happen in situations involving incredibly terrifying experiences.

Brief and moderately severe stressors enhance our cognitive abilities. This is the good stress — the kind that gives us a "kick" to do something. Memories from these events are easily retrieved; they're usually the memories where we use the expression "I remember it like it was yesterday."

A severe stressor doesn't interfere with the ability to form memories of the event, but it does interfere with access to them, disrupting neural connections between the cortex (processing) and the hypothalamus (repository of these memories). While positive stress builds a highway to memory, severe or prolonged stress not only fails to build a highway but also destroys the main road. However, the "dirt paths" remain — which in practice means accessing related memories first to reach the destination.

By the way, not sleeping enough causes stress, and being stressed makes it harder to sleep.

4 - When the Stressor Finally Disappears, All These Changes Disappear Too, and the Body Returns to Normal. But What If the Stressor Never Disappears?

This is what happens when the stressor is purely psychological. With the body in a constant state of emergency, there's no energy storage — the person is always tired, and the risk of all the above-mentioned problems increases, along with high blood pressure, diabetes, reduced immunity, and less effective tissue repair.
Psychological and social stress is fundamentally a problem of developed societies. There's something about the way we live that quietly destroys us. However, despite that not helping, it's not living in a stressful society itself that makes us sick, but rather the concrete effect of that stress on us — how we interpret it and deal with it.

5 - How to Deal with Stress

While there are universal stressors (like dangerous situations), many of the stressors present in daily life are idiosyncratic to the person. Therefore, the method for dealing with stress depends on the person and the situation. But there are some things that tend to help universally.

I don't want to repeat the same old stress and anxiety coping spiels that come up every time you type the word stress into Google. But broadly speaking, without knowing the person reading this or their context, this is more or less what can be done to help:

• Physical exercise, done of your own free will (this is important or it won't work), preferably aerobic, for a minimum of 30 minutes, several times a week.

• Meditation — not just any meditation for this. It should be mindfulness-based meditation or compassion meditation. For 15 to 30 minutes every day.

• Social support, from people of the same socioeconomic level (otherwise other potentially harmful dynamics come into play), and it doesn't work for people who prefer being alone when they're not stressed. It also helps to do something good for someone else and to have an intimate relationship with the right person.

But the ultimate strategy is expressed in Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer:
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference."

The real strategy is to understand what we cannot change and let go of inevitably futile efforts, and to understand what we can change, directing our energy there. By knowing this, the effect of making a decision and proactively doing something to help yourself already has a very positive impact.

(General source of the text)