The End of Stress As We Know It (McEwen, 2002)

44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The End of Stress As We Know It, January 24, 2003
By Donald Goewey (Point Richmond, California)

This book is cutting edge. It catches up with what the scientific research has found for two decades -- that the origins of stress are not primarily external. It is largely psychological and the good news is that we can avoid the chronic and life threatening health problems caused by the long term activation of the stress mechanism by fostering our own mental health in simple ways. And the first step is to consider the possibility that stress is not the result of what people or events do to us, but is primarily due to our own thoughts, feelings and attitudes about people and events. This book is not based on one man's opinion, but rather on scientific findings. And the evidence is that we can shift our stress provoking attitudes fundamentally through strong social support, which simply means deepening of our connection with one another in meaningful ways, supporting one another in making a mindful shift out of stress. This book sees the stressed-out condition most of us experience as a wake-up call to evolve our consciousness by first taking responsibility for the stress in our lives and next having the courage to join with others in exploring ways of shifting it. It seems, as a culture, we need a 12-step program like AA but devoted to the crisis of stress.

[JLJ - A great introduction and explanation of stress and stress-related concepts.]

p.4 Why do we get stressed out? Surely the last thing we need when times are tough is to complicate things even further by developing physical or mental illness. So why does the human organism contain a provision for causing illness under duress? The answer, of course, is that causing illness is not the function of the stress response. Rather, the fight-or-flight response evolved with the prime directive of ensuring our safety and survival. It's a powerful system, a dynamic resilience that sharpens our attention and mobilizes our bodies to cope with threatening situations, then returns to baseline, usually with no ill effects. Only when it's overwhelmed or derailed does the stress response system begin to cause disease.

This book was written to emphasize the following paradox: stress protects under acute conditions, but when activated chronically it can cause damage and accelerate disease.

p.7 Remember, the purpose of allostasis [JLJ - often thought of as the fight-or-flight response] is to help the organism remain stable in the face of any change and to provide enough energy to cope with any challenge - not just life-threatening ones.

p.7-8 deprived of its natural result, the very system designed to protect us begins to cause wear and tear instead... This is the type of stress, or the state of being stressed out, that I prefer to describe as allostatic load - the damage that the allostatic response causes when it is functioning improperly... Allostatic load is like two sumo wrestlers on a seesaw - the seesaw may be in balance, but it's under a strain that may eventually cause it to break.

p.12 Selye began to experiment... Every type of irritant produced the same constellation of responses. Why? Why should the the body react in the same way to unrelated or even opposite kinds of stimuli? The evidence was strong that the body must have a consistent, organized mechanism to help cope with a variety of insults. Selye dubbed the mechanism the general adaptation syndrome

p.12-13 If we could prove that the organism had a general nonspecific reaction-pattern with which it could meet damage caused by a variety of potential disease-producers, this defensive response would lend itself to a strictly objective, truly scientific analysis. By clarifying the function of the mechanism of response through which Nature herself fights injuries of various kinds, we might learn how to improve upon this reaction whenever it is imperfect.

p.13 Selye's research appeared in the journal Nature on July 4, 1936, as a 74-line note entitled "A Syndrome Produced by Diverse Nocuous Agents." His next step was to find a better name for his discovery than general adaptation syndrome... Eventually he hit on the word stress.

p.40 I have made the claim that stress begins in the brain... the scientists of Selye's day did not accept the brain as the master coordinator of the stress response. One might argue that stress has to begin in the brain. For the physiological mechanisms of fight or flight to be successfully sprung, an animal has to first perceive the intruder - by seeing, smelling, or hearing it - then call up past experience to decide whether to decide to run away or prepare to dine... a process associated with the brain nonetheless.

p.66 With so many ways of going wrong, it may sound as if the fight-or-flight response is a fragile thing, but actually it's quite resilient

p.201 The "altered state" of allostasis [JLJ - often thought of as the fight-or-flight response] occurs when a short-term or "acute" response is not sufficient to produce a long-term "adaptive" response.

Enter supporting content here