Stress: The Catalyst

Most people are intuitively aware that stress has an effect on the immune system. A cold or illness or an outbreak of cold sores often follows stressful episodes for many. Although stress is not directly responsible for all illnesses, it does open the door for them.

Your health is very much like a rubber band. Stress in any form will stretch the rubber band of your health, sometimes to its very limit. According to Nobel Prize nominee Dr. Hans Selye, stresses include the following: pregnancy, infections, surgery, traumas, allergic reactions, immune reactions, severe exertions, strong emotions, malnutrition, and severe exposures.

All of these stresses stretch the rubber band of your health, and put your body into a state of strain. Usually you are able to deal with the stress. You overcome the stress, shrug it off, and your body returns to normal. But sometimes stresses are prolonged and cumulative, and the stress can overwhelm our body. What happens when the rubber band of our health ‘snaps’?

Imagine that you are walking alone in the forest, when suddenly you are a confronted with a grizzly bear which rears up on its hind legs and roars at you. Your adrenal glands instantly go into action. These glands, which sit atop each kidney, are responsible for producing stress hormones such as adrenalin and cortisol, which have very interesting effects on the body. First of all, they help to reroute blood away from the digestive organs and toward the skeletal muscles, so that you can either run away from the bear faster or fight the bear more effectively, whichever you choose to do. Second, these hormones suppress the immune system. Who needs an immune system at a time like this, anyway? They also release stored sugars and fats into the bloodstream so that they can be readily used as fuel in this imminent life-or-death struggle. In the short-term, these are all excellent and very appropriate things for the body to do.

No bears in your life, you say? Consider the argument you had with your spouse this morning; the long delay in traffic when you were already late; the bills that you can’t quite pay; the boss who won’t quit harassing you; the bad news you got about your mother recently. All of these and more are stresses that produce the same reaction by the body, known as the ‘Fight or Flight Reaction’. Many of us are in a state of continual ‘Fight or Flight’ and don’t even realize it. These hormones, with their very appropriate short-term effects, are extremely damaging long-term. One stressful episode will cause a release of these hormones which then bathe your tissues for many hours, even days, causing immune depression, elevated sugar and fat levels in the blood and decreased blood supply to the internal organs. Exercise is very helpful in burning these hormones out of the blood, but prolonged, repeated stress takes a toll regardless of how much you exercise.

Every organ and gland in the body has an electrical circuit or fuse; the adrenal glands are no exception. They can short-circuit when they are overloaded, like any other organ or gland. When stress snaps the rubber band of your health, what really happens is the adrenal glands have finally short-circuited; they have become imbalanced energetically. Adrenal hormones are actually now more likely to be produced, at lesser and lesser provocations. Like a gasoline fire, the adrenals now actually flare more brightly as they are burning out. Hans Selye himself, the great discoverer of the Stress Reaction, is rumored to have believed that each of us is allocated a certain amount of adrenal energy when we are born, and when it is all gone, we die.

Three other organs now become critically important: the liver, thymus and spleen. We like to refer to these organs as the army, navy and air force of the body due to the defensive role they play for the immune system. In part because the immune system is now depressed due to over-production of adrenal hormones, these organs also begin to short-circuit. The immune system becomes further and further depressed, and we continue our downhill slide.

Stress has now opened the door to illness; the body’s defenses are down. A whole variety of things now start to go wrong. Infections which used to be easily defeated now can become chronic. Parasites may set up permanent residence in the body as well. Indeed, in a short time, your body can become a veritable zoo for these microscope creatures. Because the immune system is now too weakened to eliminate and destroy these invaders, it allows them to stay in the body, like unwelcome relatives who came for a visit and have now moved in permanently. Toxins also begin to accumulate in the body and take their own toll on health. Allergies, misalignments of the vertebrae and other bones, energetic imbalances and nutritional deficiencies also increase, as do trapped emotions. The body is now in a state of distortion. A remarkable characteristic of this condition is that it is rarely recognized for the perilous state that it is. Remember that America ranks number 1 in the world for degenerative diseases; our belief is that 90% of the population is actually in a state of distortion, and don’t realize it.

If this situation is not reversed, the inevitable end result is disease. And what is a disease? A collection of symptoms. In our work with Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia sufferers, although the symptoms are consistent from one patient to another, there is no smoking gun, no single cause of their illness. Rather, all these patients have one thing in common: they are all imbalanced in the ways we are describing. Stress, at some point in the past, snapped the rubber band of their health; their immune system became depressed; they developed energetic, structural and chemical imbalances, and now they are having symptoms. It is our belief that all diseases occur in this same way, whether the disease is cancer, heart disease, fatigue, pain, etc, etc. It is common for our patients to have several low-grade infections, parasites, and nutritional deficiencies.