The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions by Sternberg Esther M. M.D

Author:Sternberg, Esther M., M.D. [Sternberg, Esther M., M.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2001-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Let’s return for a moment to the thing that began all of this: What is stress? One part of it is obviously your body’s response, the many hormones and chemicals that we’ve just discussed. This is the part of stress that directly impacts the immune cells’ ability to fight. This end of the process, the hardwiring and chemicals that make it go, is like the motor, driveshaft, wheels, and axles that drive a car. But what about the ignition? What turns it on? As important as the motor is what happens between the event itself and the perception of the event.

For every individual exposed to an event, there is a different interpretation of its stressfulness. Recall the situation of seeing the child who runs down the driveway, falls down, and bleeds. A doctor or a nurse or an emergency technician will feel less stressed than someone unfamiliar with such injuries. In the emergency room setting, the health professional’s stress threshold has been raised by knowledge and experience and ability to act. A lot of blood in this case isn’t life-threatening, a few stitches usually suffice. But if the doctor or the nurse is presented with the same situation, but without access to suture equipment—say, on a busy highway—it takes less for their stress response to kick than it would in emergency room or clinic, where they can staunch the bleeding right away. It takes a lesser stress to turn on the body’s stress response when we don’t feel in control. Our perception of stress, and therefore our response to it, is an ever-changing thing that depends a great deal on the circumstances and settings in which we find ourselves. It depends on previous experience and knowledge, as well as on the actual event that has occurred. And it depends on memory, too.

A memory is not a threat—it cannot kill or harm, and yet a memory of a stressful event can turn on the stress response almost as much as the original event itself. This is similar to what we experience when watching a movie or playing a video game—we know these are not real and yet we feel anxiety or fear. In the case of memory, this happens because there are many nerve pathways leading from the brain’s memory centers to the hypothalamus that can trigger the stress response. One of these memory centers is called the hippocampus, that part of the brain named for its sea horse–like shape. Another is in the frontal lobe, at the front part of the brain.

One difference between real and virtual threats is that the more often the memory or the movie or the video game are re-experienced, without harm actually occurring, the weaker the body’s physiological responses soon become. Because we quickly learn that these events will do no harm, the stress response to such virtual experiences eventually extinguishes. Hence the desire by some, where actual video games are concerned, to go on to try new and more stimulating videos, to see new movies with more violent special effects.

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