Lifestyle Choices

Long-term stress can destroy your good looks, your vitality, and eventually your health. But contrary to popular belief, that doesn’t mean there is anything intrinsically dangerous in stress. On the contrary, stress is the spice of life—the challenge just waiting to be met, the excitement of something new and unknown, the wonderful, exhilarating feeling when adrenalin flows through your body and makes you feel ready for anything. It only means that if you do not know how to move from the active, stressed state of mind and body into the passive state of psychophysical relaxation at will, then you, like most people (for few have this skill naturally), are likely to find yourself stuck in the stressed state for long periods. And if it happens often enough and lasts long enough, you can become physically or mentally ill.

The Fight or Flight Mechanism

Human beings are natural seekers of challenge. In primitive times the challenge was one of survival, and this gave a certain rhythm to the working of the body. When in danger from some external cause—say, a wild animal—the body reacted instantaneously, providing the energy resources to fight or flee. The physiological changes brought about in the body by stressors are described as the “fight or flight mechanism.” Adrenal secretions flash into the blood and bring strength in the form of fat and sugar energy to the brain and muscles. The pulse races, blood pressure increases, and breathing speeds up. Within seconds the body’s full energy potential is realized, so one can deal effectively with the threat—either by fighting and destroying it or by running away to safety. Both actions use up all the chemical by-products of the stress reaction—the sugar, the adrenalin, and the increased muscle strength thataccompanies them.

When the danger passes, the body relaxes. The production of adrenalin slows to a trickle and heartbeat and breathing decrease. The body returns to its vegetative rhythm, restoring normality to physiological processes and bringing a sense of mental and physical well-being.

We are biologically the same creatures as those who dealt with wild animals. Our bodies still react to danger in the same way, but now our sense of danger comes from different threats. They can be the pressure of deadlines for work, the fear that someone is trying to take your job from you, or worry about losing the closeness of the man you love if you do what you really want to do instead of what he wants. All these and many other things too cause a woman to move into the danger rhythm state without suffering physical or mental damage.

The trouble is that modern life, with its noise, quick pace, social pressures, environmental poisons, and our orientation to sedentary mental work, presents many of us with almost constant threat situations. This is particularly true in the business world where a woman, instead of moving rhythmically out of the danger state into the vegetative one, remains for long periods (in some cases, all her waking hours) in the danger state with all the internal physical conditions that accompany it: her blood pressure rarely goes down to normal, her pulse remains rapid, and her muscles and brain are activated by the production of adrenalin but she has no physical outlets for this increased energy. Sooner or later, unless she is moved out of the threatening situation, she, the predator who at one time preyed on the wild beast, begins to prey internally on herself.

 

Stress Management

One of the most serious by-products of this kind of stress is the tension it produces. When you are under prolonged stress, you unconsciously tense different parts of your body. This affects not only the muscles, but also the organs themselves—gall bladder, liver, kidneys, even the area of the heart and lungs. In time this kind of tension restricts circulation to the organs and also prevents proper nutrient assimilation by the cells, encouraging their breakdown and early aging. This, and the fact that increased cortisone levels that accompany stress tend to knock out the body’s immune response, is why stress is at the very least a contributory factor in many contemporary ailments including ulcers, high blood pressure, arthritis, constricted blood vessels, and heart disease. Recently it has also been linked with cancer.

Because everyone’s stress level is different, and because stress taken to extreme depletes your body not only of its resistance but eventually of its life energy, stress is also a major factor in aging. In fact, one of the main theories of aging states that the body is able to withstand only so much stress and no more, and the faster this is used up, the faster it ages.

 

Stress Can Be Wonderful

But the idea that all stress is bad is patent nonsense. As human beings we would be little more than vegetables without some stress in our lives. Also, and most important, the more committed we are to the lives we are leading and the more right they are for us, the less likely we are to suffer the ravages of stress.

The women most susceptible to stress damage include those inclined to psychosomatic illness resulting from the constant conflict between what they are by nature and what, as a result of social and cultural pressures, they try to appear. This seems to me to be a particular problem for the twentieth-century woman. For the cultural and psychological stereotypes of femininity and womanliness can be heavy burdens to bear. They often have little to do with the true character of a particular woman— little to do with the self—although conditioning and the will to please have often made women accept them. But it works the other way too: many of the more dynamic, aggressive women who have striven to shed these stereotypes have their own burdens to carry in the image of the hard-driving, liberated female always eager for new challenges and always moving forward. For like a piece of elastic constantly stretched, they can eventually snap or only partly return to normal. So even those who by their nature seek out challenges eventually wear out. Nobody can live under constant strain. And any image one is forced to uphold only strains a person unnecessarily, not to mention what it can do toward destroying one’s ability to enjoy and find meaning in one’s life.

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