Emotional Vampires and Your Hormones

We often don’t even realize how stressed we are. Often, when I would ask patients about the stress in their lives they would say, “Oh no, there’s nothing special going on.” When I probed a little deeper I might find that they were the sole caretaker for a bedridden parent, and a teenage child just got a DUI, or the spouse was just laid off, and so on. That’s the way our lives are, and we are so used to it that we think it’s normal. But it’s not normal for our bodies. A common response to what feels like the uncontrollable stress in our lives is anger, a generalized anger at the whole world sometimes. We feel helpless to change or control the hamster wheel that we’re running on. Anger has been identified as the number one risk factor in heart disease, a bigger risk than LDL cholesterol levels, smoking, obesity, lack of exercise; of all the risk factors we hear so much about, anger tops the list. Researchers at the American Institute of Stress estimate that between 75 and 90 percent of all visits to health-care providers result from stress-related disorders. Stress is costing us in quality of life, in illness and disease, in money for health care, and in lost productivity. Response to stress is individual Response to stress is an individual one; something that really freaks out one person may be no big deal for another. It is not the stress itself that’s the problem but how we cope with it. If something is a source of stress for you, it doesn’t matter how many times or how many people tell you it’s no big deal. We tend to think of stress as a negative, but stress can be a great motivator that nudges us to be more productive. Do you, or someone you know, find that creativity and productivity flow more easily when you have a deadline? It is often the difference in perception that causes some stress to be good stress (eustress) rather than bad stress (distress).