Stress and Crafting
Good Life By Dr. Jim Manganiello © all rights reserved-2003Whoever lives longest doesn't win any prize. But preserving our health and well-being are important parts of what I call Crafting Good Life— a life lived with love, courage, wisdom and passion. We harvest greatest treasures of a well-lived, loved, and understood life in last third of our journey here. To be around for harvest, we need to know how to safeguard our health and well-being and if we’re serious about doing that—then understanding and controlling stress needs to be at top of our “things to do” list.
Most people are hungry to connect to who they deeply are, a connection often made difficult and even impossible by our family and cultural; conditioning. Conditioning sets limits that can keep us trapped in an identity that often swims in a sea of stress hormones because it’s too small for who we truly are.
Stress related illnesses cause more deaths yearly than deaths resulting from all other causes combined. Our health care system is really a disease care system, so it doesn’t work to prevent stress related illnesses before they occur–it treats them only after they arise. Stress is a biochemical event that involves powerful hormones: cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. When our inner pharmacy releases these stress hormones into our body too often or for too long, they become toxic poisons that can compromise our health and even kill us.
The World Health Organization now recognizes stress as number one health problem in industrialized nations. And as Dr. Paul Rosch, president of nonprofit American Institute of Stress, noted, in America stress is "...taking a terrible toll on nation's health and economy. It is a heavy contributor to heart disease, cancer, respiratory distress, lupus and many other life threatening illnesses."
Two-thirds of visits to primary care medical physicians in this country are for symptoms resulting from stress. More than 100 million people are taking weekly medication to manage stress, medication which is for most people unnecessary and which can cause serious side effects and addiction.
What causes stress? Many things, including, real or perceived, job, family and financial pressures. Our mind and body are an interdependent unit: mindbody. If we worry too much about financial catastrophe, for example, primitive part of our brain can misinterpret our worry as actual financial failure and then stress hormones will be released as part of an “emergency alert” reaction.
There are two switches on our body's involuntary nervous system: one is for ordinary housekeeping chores; other is for emergency situations.
When one switch is on, other is off. The ordinary housekeeping switch controls normal processes of our body such as breathing, digestion and metabolism. The emergency switch is designed to enable us to survive in face life threatening emergencies by triggering our body's "stress response," also known as "fight or flight response."
