Emotional intelligence by Goleman Daniel

Author:Goleman, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Emotions, Emotions and cognition, Emotions
Publisher: New York : Bantam Books
Published: 1995-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

The same stress-infection pattern holds for the herpes virus—both the type that causes cold sores on the lip and the type that causes genital lesions. Once people have been exposed to the herpes virus, it stays latent in the body, flaring up from time to time. The activity of the herpes virus can be tracked by levels of antibodies to it in the blood. Using this measure, reactivation of the herpes virus has been found in medical students undergoing year-end exams, in recently separated women, and among people under constant pressure from caring for a family member with Alzheimer's disease. 25

The toll of anxiety is not just that it lowers the immune response; other research is showing adverse effects on the cardiovascular system. While chronic hostility and repeated episodes of anger seem to put men at greatest risk for heart disease, the more deadly emotion in women may be anxiety and fear. In research at Stanford University School of Medicine with more than a thousand men and women who had suffered a first heart attack, those women who went on to suffer a second heart attack were marked by high levels of fearfulness and anxiety. In many cases the fearfulness took the form of crippling phobias: after their first heart attack the patients stopped driving, quit their jobs, or avoided going out. 26

The insidious physical effects of mental stress and anxiety—the kind produced by high-pressure jobs, or high-pressure lives such as that of a single mother juggling day care and a job—are being pinpointed at an anatomically fine-grained level. For example, Stephen Manuck, a University of Pittsburgh psychologist, put thirty volunteers through a rigorous, anxiety-riddled ordeal in a laboratory while he monitored the men's blood, assaying a substance secreted by blood platelets called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which can trigger blood-vessel changes that may lead to heart attacks and strokes. While the volunteers were under the intense stress, their ATP levels rose sharply, as did their heart rate and blood pressure.

Understandably, health risks seem greatest for those whose jobs are high in "strain": having high-pressure performance demands while having little or no control over how to get the job done (a predicament that gives bus drivers, for instance, a high rate of hypertension). For example, in a study of 569 patients with colorectal cancer and a matched comparison group, those who said that in the previous ten years they had experienced severe on-the-job aggravation were five and a half times more likely to have developed the cancer compared to those with no such stress in their lives. 27

Because the medical toll of distress is so broad, relaxation techniques— which directly counter the physiological arousal of stress—are being used

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