56 | www.Ups tatePhys i c i ansSC . com | www.Hea l thL i nksUps tate. com “So many people feel like they have to white knuckle through long hours or home stress because they have no other options,” Dr. Blackmon added. “Their body is so used to being in that state, they don’t realize it is happening.” However, humans are animals at the core, their bodies respond via instincts and fight or flight responses are instinctual. People who spend months assuring everyone that they are fine when they are not will probably hear from their body eventually – maybe through a racing heart, shingles or eye twitches. The manifestations are many. “I don’t know if people are more stressed now than they ever were before,” said Dr. Daniel Greenberg, associate professor and chair of the Psychology Department at the College of Charleston. “Certainly there are stressors now that weren’t around a hundred years ago, but there were stressors back then that aren’t around today. In the long run, chronic fight-orflight responses typically have more of an effect than one or two extreme events – such as encountering the proverbial tiger in a dark forest and somehow managing to escape.” So where then is the proverbial tiger in the dark forest – or Tommy Neal’s real-life encounter with the mastiff? Dr. Greenberg pointed out that while extreme incidents sometimes happen to people, the everyday fight-or-flight stresses affect our health more than all the dogs and tigers put together. “Actually, a brief fight-or-flight response is a good thing. It kicks your sympathetic nervous system into high gear to help you defend against a threat. And, normally, you escape the danger with little or no harm,” he said. “The real problem is chronic stress, which has all sorts of negative effects.” Chronic stress can come from family upheavals, money problems, personal relationships, illness and death and even dealing with traffic. When these conditions happen too often, or even in one or two life-changing moments, they can affect your health in many ways: • Cardiovascular disease and hypertension; • A weakened immune system, which can make you more vulnerable to infection and hamper your body’s ability to heal; • Brain atrophy, particularly in areas for learning and memory; • Higher risk for depression and anxiety; • Gastrointestinal/metabolic illnesses. A precise timeline for when fight-or-flight manifestations will affect health negatively is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint. “It is very individualized,” Dr. Blackmon explained. “Some people are predisposed to it having a large impact; others have more resiliency. A lot of studies after Sept. 11, for example, revealed that some people have PTSD and others don’t.” Solutions range from deep breathing to exercise to professional counseling. But Greenberg advised that regardless of the size or frequency of the fight-or-flight stresses, finding your own way to handle them is the best you can do – especially if you are a student. “My colleagues and I worry that students now don’t have the skills to cope with these stresses,” he said. “These skills are called ‘grit,’ ‘resiliency’ and other things, but they allow you to pick yourself up when you fail, take a deep breath and move on. And while you could dismiss this as older folks grumbling about ‘kids these days,’ the increase in demand for mental health services suggests otherwise.” CHRONIC FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT STRESSES BY ERA 1940s - 1950s • Continual threat of armed war – confirmed by the Korean War and World War II; • Global spread of communism through the Cold War; • Social pressure for wives to keep a spotless home; • Physical bullying in school; • Making a living. 1970s - 1980s • Sudden threat of armed war – confirmed by the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis; • Doubled-digit inflation and interest rates; • Physical bullying in school; • Prevalence of sexual diseases – AIDS and herpes; • Finding work to make a living. 2020s • Illness and death from COVID; • Constant political unrest and division in the United States; • Physical bullying in school, made worse by social media; • Business failures, short-staffing, supply chain issues; • Job insecurity, which often includes no health insurance, no benefits and inflated salaries to pay for inflated consumer prices.
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