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Kati Clark
A5 Health
4/17/14
Stress: The Portrait of a Killer
Jack Wagner once said, Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it. By
definition stress is a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very
demanding circumstances. Another thing to know about stress is that it isnt only a state of mind, it is
measurable and very dangerous. What is stress caused by? Is it what everyone expects it to be? In the
documentary by National Geographic: Stress: The Portrait of a Killer it discusses various studies done on
stress and what it is caused by. And after very shocking discoveries the conclusion was made that stress is
caused by social and psychological effects and can be detrimental to all around health.
Multiple studies done and explained in the documentary discussed how stress is caused and why
it even exists. There are two kinds of stress: the first and enjoyable stress comes from adrenaline and a
hormone that responds to stress effects called glucocortoids. The second kind comes from a hierarchical
set up of social life. As found in the University College of London Whitehall study on stress the lower
your rank on the social scale the higher your total amount of stress is going to be, and with this stress may
come higher blood pressure and heart rate, but that will be covered later. The social and psychological
causes in general are a feeling of inadequacy or insufficiency which explains why if a person is feeling
like they are at the bottom of the food chain on a social perspective then they are more likely to have
higher stress levels.
The effects of stress vary greatly. It can cause something as simple as sleep deprivation, or it can
cause the great extreme of death. One of the effects of stress is something that most people wouldnt
connect to stress: weak immune systems. When you are stressed your body will shut down what it thinks
is an unimportant function at the time, for example your immune system causing you to get sick more
often and much easier. Another effect of stress is found in the brain, your hippocampus to be exact. The
idea that stress makes you dumb is very true, Dr. Steven Stein did a study on stress and concluded with
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the idea that, if stress prevents us from being aware of and controlling our emotions, getting along with
others, adapting to changes, and maintaining a positive mood, then our EI is going to suffer. In fact, it has
been scientifically demonstrated that emotional intelligence is actually more important in predicting
success in the workplace than IQ (cognitive intelligence). So essentially stress is like drugs or alcohol, it
makes it so your brain isnt functioning like it normally would causing you to act stupid. Thus the
phrase, stress makes you stupid. It isnt stress in the moment that affects us the most, stress in the
present will affect us down the road in all aspects of health.
Hans Selye said once, Its not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it. How a person deals
with stress says a lot about who they are. The ironic thing about stress is that as humans we dont want to
get rid of stress, we want to learn to control it. People still want to have that good stress from adrenaline
but they want to lose some of the bad social stress, thus we want to control it. With this want arises the
questions, how do we control stress?
How do we control stress? Well I suppose that is the question isnt it? William James puts it very
nicely I think, The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. I
dont think we can control our stress, however there are other factors on the same page as stress I think
we can control. One of the greatest cures for an excess of stress is controlling your situation. Stress is
immensely related to where we are in life and how happy we are with our situation. So if you give a
person a degree of control then there is the potential for a decrease in stress. So I think the whole point in
learning about stress is because if you learn about something you can gain a control of it.
Stress, the cause for a lack of sleep, a gain in weight, and in some cases a great adrenaline rush.
Stress, like a lot of things, is something that humans wish to control but just havent quite reached yet, it
is a state of mind and is cause by social and psychological settings. And I think the best way to sum up a
persons situation with controlling their stress is to quote Amelia Earhart when she said, The most
difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do
anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is
its own reward.