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A Type Of Stress You Don't Even Notice

Gradual 'Lifetime Stress' Is Less Apparent Than Trauma, But Some Experts Believe It Causes Similar Harm

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In this column: The sneakiest form of stress is the gradual stress that comes from a lifetime of continual change. Learn how to acknowledge and compensate for "lifetime stress."

Much research has been done about the stress associated with major life events such as divorce, the death of a loved one and illness. Much discussion is given to day-to-day hassles involving family and work.

But little attention has been paid to the accumulation of stress that plays out over an entire life span. Could decades of stress partially explain why we grow ill and die?

Even if your immediate life seems stable, you are continually being subjected to psychosocial stressors. The world around you is in constant flux, and as it transforms, you are pulled along in those changes. You are forced to learn how to revise and alter your perceptions, and adapt accordingly.

IBS illustration by Melissa WarpThis continual personal metamorphosis causes stress both external and internal, yet it's rarely discussed.

That's in part because it's highly difficult to measure the effects of stress over the course of a lifetime.

What Have You Lived Through?

Take a few minutes to review the stress you've experienced in your life. What first comes to mind is the time you were fired, hospitalized for a ruptured appendix, or crashed the brand new Buick. But what about all those seemingly non-events that you learned to deal with and work through -- the personal adaptations you had to make when you felt temporary terror in your heart?

Like the first time you gave a speech, or the first time you had to wash your newborn baby, or the first time you asked someone out on a date? Remember how your knees knocked, your heart raced, your armpits perspired?

Even when your life seems stable and trouble-free, you are being stressed without necessarily realizing it and being asked to take on new roles and process new contexts. You turn on the TV and hear about thousands of innocent people who have been buried alive in an earthquake, or about a three-year-old found brutally murdered, or about terrorists that are threatening to spread the anthrax virus in the subways. None of this news impacts directly on your life, but it stresses you nonetheless.

Have you ever taken the time to count up all the stressful entries in your life? The total is staggering. Dr. Aaron Antonovsky, a medical sociology professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel and the author of "Source: Health, Stress and Coping," believes that minor incidents over the course of a lifetime cause accumulated stress and associated harms.

Can Boredom Be Stressful?

No matter how well you prepare yourself to wage the struggle of life, the game keeps changing, shifting, posing new challenges and asserting fresh demands. Dr. Iago Galdston, editor of "Beyond the Germ Theory: The Roles of Deprivation and Stress in Health and Disease," put it well when he said: "Life is a walk on a tightrope with a constant change of clothes, and taking on and discarding objects."

You can also be stressed by underload. Remember the long, dull hours spent in junior high, sitting in a hard chair, bored stiff by geometric axioms and isosceles triangles? Or those yawning meetings you've plodded through, in overheated rooms, given by phlegmatic, robotic suits?

There is good reason to believe that an environment that makes no demands, that is benign, banal and boring, is also a stressor. Our complex brains thrive on stimulation. Research proves that sensory deprivation is psychologically harmful to children and animals.

If you walk through a nursing home, you will soon see the effects of underload. Is it your imagination or did your grandmother fade rapidly and die, soon after your family put her into a nursing home? Our central nervous systems function better when they are aroused.

Learn How To Relax

Count up all the times you briefly felt terror when you had to learn something new, and the many times your heart was made heavy by the tragic events in the news. Factor in those vacuous expanses of time when you were forced to sit still and do nothing, and you will see a life lived full of another kind of stress. Now look into the future. Envision what pitfalls await you. Sometimes it feels as if our lives are out of our control.

That's why it's critical to lessen the stressors that you actually have some control over. Learning how to relax can help you make the most of your short, albeit stress-filled, time on Earth. Further reading:

--Jacqueline Tresl, RN, a coronary intensive care nurse and nursing supervisor for over 20 years, has written about health and happiness for magazines and newspapers for three years. Her first book, "Whoever Heard of a Horse In The House?" is scheduled for release in March.
--First published Nov. 24, 1999.


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