alone the time a coyote chased it two months ago. This kind of repetitive
stress is harmful to us, because no organism was designed with a
mechanism to deal with negative effects on the body when the stress
response is turned on with great frequency and for long duration. In other
words, no creature can avoid the consequences of living in long-term
emergency situations. When we turn on the stress response and can’t turn it
off, we’re headed for some type of breakdown in the body.
Let’s say you keep turning on the fight-or-flight system due to some
threatening circumstance in your life (real or imagined). As your racing
heart pumps enormous amounts of blood to your extremities and your body
is knocked out of homeostasis, you’re becoming prepared by the nervous
system to run or fight. But let’s face it: you can’t flee to the Bahamas, nor
can you throttle your fellow employee—that would be primitive. So as a
consequence, you condition your heart to race all the time, and you may be
headed for high blood pressure, arrhythmias, and so on.
And what’s in store when you keep mobilizing all that energy for some
emergency situation? If you’re putting the bulk of your energy toward some
issue in your external environment, there will be little left for your body’s
internal environment. Your immune system, which monitors your inner
world, can’t keep up with the lack of energy for growth and repair.
Therefore, you get sick, whether it be from a cold, cancer, or rheumatoid
arthritis. (All are immune-mediated conditions.)
When you think about it, the real difference between animals and
ourselves is that although we both experience stress, humans reexperience
and “pre-experience” traumatic situations. What is so harmful about having
our stress response triggered by pressures from the past, present, and
future? When we get knocked out of chemical balance so often, eventually
that out-of-balance state becomes the norm. As a result, we are destined to
live out our genetic destiny, and in most cases that means suffering from
some illness.
The reason is clear: The domino effect from the cascade of hormones and
other chemicals we release in response to stress can dysregulate some of
our genes, and that may create disease. In other words, repeated stress
pushes the genetic buttons that cause us to begin to head toward our genetic
destiny. So what was once very adaptive behavior and a beneficial
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