Hans Selye

The Stress of Modern Living

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I’m stressed, my friends are stressed, and let’s face it, the entire nation is stressed. In modern life, we’re bombarded with the daily list of to dos, the noise of 24 hour news and cable, the incessant activity of the internet and in the current economy, the constant threat of job loss and financial insecurity. True, the stressors we face today compared to those faced by previous generations are not generally life-threatening, but they are deadly, just over a longer period of time.

Chronic stress, the underbelly of modern life (pun intended), is perhaps as much to blame for the increased rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes as are other lifestyle variables such as diet and exercise. Our physiological responses to stressors were meant to be acute, short-term adaptations that allowed us to survive an immediate threat. The chronicity of modern stress has turned a very basic survival mechanism into a death trap and I’m not sure we’ve fully evolved to adapt to this new, never-ending state of stress.

Think about what happens to the body when it is faced with a stressor; it mounts a physiological response against the stressor. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the stressor is, the physiological responses are quite similar. Have you ever noticed that the early stages of illness look a lot alike, GI disturbances, heart rate changes, loss of appetite, sometimes fever, aches and pains- that general feeling that you are coming down with something? This is your body reacting to an internal stressor, an illness.
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