You suppose many people think of stress as a form of time pressure. Busy, busy, busy, so much to do, so little time to do it. Others think of stress as a type of constant grinding worry, like money problems, or having an oppressive boss at work. Stress can also be seen as a transient state,for instance, moving house, or getting married, or even getting up on a Monday morning.
Many people believe that stress is good for us, and without it we would just lounge about doing nothing at all, certainly true in my case. This lack of any clear definition, or even agreement about fundamental principles, such as whether stress per se is healthy, or unhealthy, does make it tricky to measure it in any repeatable way. And without a measurement the medical profession tends to lose interest rapidly.Once you have your figure, you can then give drugs and watch the figure change in front of your very eyes. Then you can draw graphs, do an audit, write papers ... and all sorts of things.
Proper science, no less. The sort that gets published in proper journals and leads to proper promotions. But with things like stress, no such measurements exist. We are in the world of the subjective experience, where we have to rely on personal testimony and suchlike. It is not a place where many medical researchers like to venture. This does not mean that I am simply going to claim that stress is the main cause of heart disease and leave it at that. Indeed, I intend to use a great deal of evidence to make the case for, or should that be against, stress.
Just because you can not accurately measure everything does not mean that you should give up, or try to use good scientific research wherever possible. At this point, therefore, having thrown enough caveats into the air to sink a battleship, I will take the plunge and attempt to show you exactly how stress causes heart disease. Before I can do this, though, I have to dismantle stress into its component parts.
Firstly, we will need to separate out the things that cause stress, the 'stressors' , from the 'stress response; i.e. the physiological effects that stressors create. Of course, not all stressors will create a stress response. For example, the number four will have no effect on most people in the West-whereas the number thirteen might. After separating cause and effect, a further split is necessary because there are two basic stress responses: healthy and unhealthy.
Ari has been writing articles for nearly 4 years. Come visit his latest website over at murraylawnmowerparts.info which helps people find the best Murray Lawn Mower Parts and information they are looking for Lawn Mower Parts.
Click the XML Icon Above to Receive Self Improvement Articles Via RSS!