When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté Read Free Book Online

habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. People may become addicted to their own stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, Hans Selye observed. To such persons stress feels desirable, while the absence of it feels like something to be avoided.
    When people describe themselves as being stressed, they usually mean the nervous agitation they experience under excessive demands—most commonly in the areas of work, family, relationships, finances or health. But sensations of nervous tension do not define stress—nor, strictly speaking, are they always perceived when people are stressed. Stress, as we will define it, is not a matter of subjective feeling. It is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body, involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system and many other organs. Both animals and people can experience stress with no awareness of its presence.
    “Stress is not simply nervous tension,” Selye pointed out. “Stress reactions do occur in lower animals, and even in plants, that have no nervous systems…. Indeed, stress can be produced under deep anaesthesia in patients who are unconscious, and even in cell cultures grown outside the body.” 3 Similarly, stress effects can be highly active in persons who are fully awake, but who are in the grip of unconscious emotions or cut off from their body responses. The physiology of stress may be triggered without observable effects on behaviour and without subjective awareness, as has been shown in animal experiments and in human studies.
    What, then, is stress? Selye—who coined the word in its present usage and who described with mock pride how
der stress, le stress
and
lo stress
entered the German, French and Italian languages respectively—conceived of stress as a biological process, a wide-ranging set of events in the body, irrespective of cause or of subjective awareness. Stress consists of the internal alterations—visible or not—that occur when the organism perceives a threat to its existence or well-being. While nervoustension may be a component of stress, one can be stressed without feeling tension. On the other hand, it is possible to feel tension without activating the physiological mechanisms of stress.
    In searching for a word to capture the meaning of the physical changes he observed in his experiments, Selye “stumbled upon the term
stress
, which had long been used in common English, and particularly in engineering, to denote the effects of a force acting against a resistance.” He gives the example of changes induced in a stretched rubber band or in a steel spring under pressure. These changes may be noted with the naked eye or may be evident only on microscopic examination.
    Selye’s analogies illustrate an important point: excessive stress occurs when the demands made on an organism exceed that organism’s reasonable capacities to fulfill them. The rubber band snaps, the spring becomes deformed. The stress response can be set off by physical damage, either by infection or injury. It can also be triggered by emotional trauma or just by the threat of such trauma, even if purely imaginary. Physiological stress responses can be evoked when the threat is outside conscious awareness or even when the individual may believe himself to be stressed in a “good” way.
    Alan, a forty-seven-year-old engineer, was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus—the swallowing tube that carries food from the throat to the stomach—a few years ago. He spoke of “good stress” when he described the relentless, self-driven existence he had led in the year before he was diagnosed with his malignancy. That “good stress” not only helped undermine his health, but it also served to distract him from painful issues in his life that were themselves constant sources of ongoing physiological disturbance in his