Moments after birth, typically grazing prey animals are well-equipped to deal with their place in the food chain. It’s a hierarchy as brutal in its manner of survival through the mating conflict of males as it is being caught by a predator, but the point remains in that indices of stress define almost everything on Earth. By contrast or some might say, identically so, a political system is a chain of command in its Machiavellian rough and tumble while enduring in a league of teams is less existential by Tennyson’s ‘tooth and claw’ and more exponential, in its weekly stress.

A way of measuring the effects of life’s struggle, though, is to look at the ‘Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory’. This index of damaging life events ranks in order of impact from the ‘Death of a spouse’, which was randomly assigned 100-points as a Life Change Unit (LCU) and placed at number one: in comparison to a traffic violation earning 11-points, as it reached number 43. Also known as the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), the system has been widely used across stress research for decades while at the same time courting criticism for chief amongst things, equating a value to events that may register differently in people. Added to this relative management of life are concerns over aspects of methodology, too.

So, the placing of ‘Changes in residence’ at 32 and ranked 20^th in its impact rating, can’t and won’t apply to a lot of people and despite the well-known stressors of moving day, it’s one thing to be packing for an upgrade or a shift sideways. It’s something else entirely to be leaving under duress and worse still, unexpectedly so. This relativity was found in relation to the ‘deaths of close friends’, ‘serious illness and injury’ and ‘job loss’, too.

‘When your body senses danger, it activates the body’s sympathetic nervous system (SNS) to help maintain homeostasis (stability when adapting to change). This system also helps prepare you to handle danger, whether real or perceived.’

‘The SNS is involved in the body’s stress response. It releases the stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, to help with the “fight or flight” response. When the acute stress is over, the parasympathetic nervous system helps your body return to its normal state.’

The American Institute of Stress

So, naturally the weight of anything may be relative, yet the inventory has been validated across ethnicities and cross-culturally, too, with apparent consistency. That’s helpful in searching for predictive values of ill-health and the idea that the weight and frequency of a stressful event or LCU, leads to an outcome further down the line. In fact, the additive damage of stress is like a war of attrition on the body but one where your realisation and response turns into mission creep, as you try to roll back the ravage. It might be a difficult situation at work or the constant battles, in any type of relationship. A neighbour’s selfishness with building work, for example, or the transitory nature of a daily encounter. Our levels of helplessness make a difference just like the characters we meet who have some sort of bearing on our lives and ultimately, the cells in our bodies.

Meanwhile, these knock-on effects are well-documented, meaning no matter where you look in your physiological system: long-term stress may be a problem. For instance, the simplicity of tight muscles in the so-called ‘Tension Triangle’ between the shoulders and forehead can lead to a shortening of fibres that in turn makes it easier to strain, through a loss of flexibility. That, as we all know, precipitates more problems with the body being the domino effect that it is. So, before you know it, days off work and trips to a practitioner start lining you up for a slightly bigger crisis.

‘The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term health issues.’

Bessel Van Der Volk, ‘The body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma’

Penguin Books, p47

It’s clear, stress can linger throughout the body if we’re not careful, and for a long time the link between emotional problems and our bodily function has been clear. If not always evidentially then experientially at least where anecdotally, millions of people worldwide have followed their feelings in joining the dots. This has been called many things but most commonly perhaps, ‘The Mind-Body Connection’ – a tie-in that feels as ancient as it does mysterious while at the same time, making perfect sense. It stretches back to an idea that in theory seems unassailable in its conspicuous cause and effect, yet for decades Western medicine seemed more or less uninterested in what it had to offer. Obviously, there are real-world reasons for this, but the fact remains that an entire approach to human wellbeing was overlooked for a long time.

Times have changed, though, and in 2014, a series of experiments took place in which people were asked to indicate on diagrams of the human body where they experienced a reaction, in response to viewing certain stimuli. It’s a subjective process with insight into the way somatosensory function can influence our moods. So, various parts of anatomy were recorded in line with people’s emotions with the study carried out in both Western Europe and Eastern Asia.

It all leans into an academic discipline called psychophysiology which as the name implies, combines the two subjects of psychology and physiology. In essence, it looks at how psychological variables affect physiological responses and vice versa as physiological factors impact psychological reactions. At the same time, this mind-body communication process is measured in various ways, including:

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which analyses the structure of the brain
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) as it differentiates oxygenated and deoxygenated blood
Electroencephalography (EEG) which monitors electrical activity through the scalp
Magnetoelectroencephalography (MEG) studies the weak magnetic fields produced in the brain
Electromyography (EMG) which measures activity across the musculoskeletal system
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as it records the interbeat interval (IBI) of your pulse
Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) gauges the level of moisture through skin conductance (SC)
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans a tracer atom placed into a molecule like glucose as it travels through the bloodstream
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) depolarises and hyperpolarises neurons at the scalp   

So, these biofeedback methods improve our understanding of things like positive and negative emotions, guilt, stress and adaptations while reinforcing the mind-body connection through evidence-based methodologies. On the one hand, it seems odd that we ever questioned the link when a spinal chord laced with the threading of a nervous system, stretches throughout the body. On the other, these things evolve over time and since the mind-body-dualism of René Descartes, it’s easy to look back with knowledge.

Meanwhile, Anne Harrington is a professor in the History of Science at Harvard University and in 2009, she published a book called: ‘The Cure Within – A History of Mind-Body Medicine’. In an interview with The Harvard Gazette at the time, she said:

‘For some, the ideas and practices of mind-body medicine – ideas about stress, about positive thinking, about the health benefits of techniques like meditation – help to bring a person’s suffering into focus, help it to make sense, and offer ways for a person to have some perceived direct control over their experience. For these reasons, mind-body medicine can be empowering, and [can] suggest ways that people might change their lives in order to gain control of their disease.’

With advocates like this, it was perhaps inevitable that Western medicine should at some point catch up and various studies have seen a gradual embrace of the alternative. In fact, in 2023, neuroscientific links were found between the brain and the rest of our physiology, meaning bona fide back up for mindfulness, yoga and a host of other things that may encourage people to see stress differently. So, the truth of how we perceive it changes its effect, and it’s an indictment on ignorance no matter which way it flows with the knock-on economic impact known, too.

In two reports, four years apart, for instance, the UK saw high levels of recorded anxiety in relation to GDP. In 2018, the New Economics Foundation reported that over half-a-million workers experienced: ‘work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2016/17 leading to 12.5 million working days lost.’ Then, in 2022, the Mental Health Foundation said: ‘A poll finds one-in-ten (10%) of UK adults feeling hopeless about financial circumstances, more than one-third (34%) feeling anxious, and almost three in ten (29%) feeling stressed in the past month.’

These figures simply reinforce what is now common knowledge worldwide; so, maybe we should be asking whether a personal cost evaluation is long overdue?

Copyright © 2024 | recoveryourwellbeing.com | All Rights Reserved

Images:

Stress, by Alban Gogh, Pixabay – Main Image
Leaning Into Thoughts, by Eric W, Pexels
Medical Research, by Tara Winstead, Pexels

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