HEALTHY AGING

AND STRESS

 

Earlier I mentioned that stress is one of the key negative aging factors.
Yet it isn't the stress per se that's the problem.  In fact, we need stress.
We need stress to be alive and to function well.  Hans Selye made this point
decades ago when he relabeled some stress as eu-stress (literally good
stress).  This is the stress that you and I experience as excitement, as
"passion," as "enthusiasm," or even as "love."  This is the stress that
optimally keeps you functioning well.

 

We know and experience this kind of stress in any kind of sport.  The effort
you expend as you rally your speed or strength or endurance to do something
that you find exciting expresses a healthy effort.  It enables your muscles
to grow, your lungs and heart to develop, it enables you to tap into your
physical potentials.  It's good for you!   This is the kind of stress I long
for and plan for when I go to the gym.  The exercises I engage in push me to
exert a level of effort that uses a certain set of muscles and in the
process, enables the muscles to grow and to become stronger or more
flexible. 

 

Imagine a stress scale from 0 to 10.   When you are at zero on that
scale-you are dead.  There is nothing going on, nothing is alive, nothing is
moving, nothing is striving.  And at the low numbers (1 to 3) there is very
little stress.  You are resting, relaxing, or sleeping (if it's healthy);
you are depressed or lacking vitality (if unhealthy).  Then there is the
range of eu-stress (4 to 6).  This is the healthy range-the range of stress
that you need to be alive and growing.  And this applies to the mind and
spirit as well as the body.  Beyond the eu-stress range is the dangerous
range (7 to 10).  Here there is too much stress and except for an emergency,
this is not a range to live in.

 

What is "stress?"  Stress refers to anything that activates the
mind-body-emotion system requesting or demanding that we respond in order to
deal with whatever is challenging.  If the challenge or threat is in the
eu-stress zone, things are fine.  You have the resources for handling it and
you probably love handing it.  You find it exciting and enlivening.  But
above that, the challenge is a threat or an over-load.  These are the two
messages that kick in the general arousal syndrome when the brain gets them.
Then, adrenaline and cortisol is released into your blood stream.  Then the
heart and lungs start pumping away as blood is withdrawn from brain and
stomach and sent to the larger muscle units.  Then to handle the extreme
danger (the threat or over-load) you are ready to fight or flee, or freeze.

 

If this happens on a temporary basis, it is acute stress and designed to
help you deal with the emergency and then get back to normal.  But if this
happens regularly or, worse still, consistently, then you are in chronic
stress.  This will exasperate any illness or disease and/or create different
diseases.  It lies at the heart of cardio-vascular diseases.

 

Now as a fact of life, stress is not the problem per se.  The problem lies
in how a person manages it or more accurately, how a person does not manage
it.  And again, the key goes to how you think about stress, about over-load,
about adding more and more demands to everyday life, about how you interpret
things as threat which are actually psychological issues and not physical
threats, etc. 

 

The bottom line is that despite the idea that "stress makes you old," it is
actually not stress that does that.  It is rather the perception of stress
that ages you.  It is fearing stress, hating stress, living in stress-these
are the things that age a person.  It is the inability to manage stress well
and the lack of resources for handling stress effectively-these are the
things that will age you before your time.

 

Actually, living in and with eustress keeps you young in body and in heart.
Living above the eustress level (from 7 to 10 on the stress scale)-that is
what will wear you out and makes you old.  To manage stress- change your
frames about things that are not true threats or dangers, but psychological
fears.  Build up your resources for handling everyday challenges.  Develop a
dozen de-stressing processes so that you can quickly get stress out of your
body.  Then you don't have to live with it.  Slow down and do one thing at a
time.  Be fully present in everything you do.  These are the things that you
can choose to do that will enable you to manage stress and prevent it from
undermining healthy aging.

 

 Call Marie    0411515802




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.