Psychology Questions and Paper

Who Says Stress Is Bad For You? Carmichael, Mary . Newsweek ; New York 153.8 (Feb 23, 2009): n/a.

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ABSTRACT (ABSTRACT)  

[Robert Sapolsky]'s and [Salvatore Maddi]'s work points to a flaw with much of the neurobiological research: so far,

it has done a poor job of accounting for differences in how individuals process stress. Researchers haven't

identified the point at which the effects of stress tip over from positive to negative, and they know little about why

that point differs from person to person. FULL TEXT  

If you aren't already paralyzed with stress from reading the financial news, here's a sure way to achieve that grim

state: read a medical-journal article that examines what stress can do to your brain. Stress, you'll learn, is crippling

your neurons so that, a few years or decades from now, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease will have an easy time

destroying what's left. That's assuming you haven't already died by then of some other stress-related ailment such

as heart disease. As we enter what is sure to be a long period of uncertainty-a gantlet of lost jobs, dwindling

assets, home foreclosures and two continuing wars-the downside of stress is certainly worth exploring. But what

about the upside? It's not something we hear much about.

In the past several years, a lot of us have convinced ourselves that stress is unequivocally negative for everyone,

all the time. We've blamed stress for a wide variety of problems, from slight memory lapses to full-on dementia-and

that's just in the brain. We've even come up with a derisive nickname for people who voluntarily plunge into

stressful situations: they're "adrenaline junkies."

Sure, stress can be bad for you, especially if you react to it with anger or depression or by downing five glasses of

Scotch. But what's often overlooked is a common-sense counterpoint: in some circumstances, it can be good for

you, too. It's right there in basic-psychology textbooks. As Spencer Rathus puts it in "Psychology: Concepts and

Connections," "some stress is healthy and necessary to keep us alert and occupied." Yet that's not the theme that's

been coming out of science for the past few years. "The public has gotten such a uniform message that stress is

always harmful," says Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. "And that's too

bad, because most people do their best under mild to moderate stress."

The stress response-the body's hormonal reaction to danger, uncertainty or change-evolved to help us survive, and

if we learn how to keep it from overrunning our lives, it still can. In the short term, it can energize us, "revving up our

systems to handle what we have to handle," says Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist at UCLA. In the long term, stress can

motivate us to do better at jobs we care about. A little of it can prepare us for a lot later on, making us more

resilient. Even when it's extreme, stress may have some positive effects-which is why, in addition to posttraumatic

stress disorder, some psychologists are starting to define a phenomenon called posttraumatic growth. "There's

really a biochemical and scientific bias that stress is bad, but anecdotally and clinically, it's quite evident that it can

work for some people," says Orloff. "We need a new wave of research with a more balanced approach to how

stress can serve us." Otherwise, we're all going to spend far more time than we should stressing ourselves out

about the fact that we're stressed out.

When I started asking researchers about "good stress," many of them said it essentially didn't exist. "We never tell

people stress is good for them," one said. Another allowed that it might be, but only in small ways, in the short

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term, in rats. What about people who thrive on stress, I asked-people who become policemen or ER docs or air-

traffic controllers because they like seeking out chaos and putting things back in order? Aren't they using stress to

their advantage? No, the researchers said, those people are unhealthy. "This business of people saying they 'thrive

on stress'? It's nuts," Bruce Rabin, a distinguished psychoneuroimmunologist, pathologist and psychiatrist at the

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told me. Some adults who seek out stress and believe they flourish

under it may have been abused as children or permanently affected in the womb after exposure to high levels of

adrenaline and cortisol, he said. Even if they weren't, he added, they're "trying to satisfy" some psychological need.

Was he calling this a pathological state, I asked-saying that people who feel they perform best under pressure

actually have a disease? He thought for a minute, and then: "You can absolutely say that. Yes, you can say that."

This kind of statement might well have the father of stress research lying awake worried in his grave. Hans Selye,

who laid the foundations of stress science in the 1930s, believed so strongly in good stress that he coined a word,

"eustress," for it. He saw stress as "the salt of life." Change was inevitable, and worrying about it was the flip side

of thinking creatively and carefully about it, something that only a brain with a lot of prefrontal cortex can do well.

Stress, then, was what made us human-a conclusion that Selye managed to reach by examining rats.

Selye had virtually no lab technique, and, as it turned out, that was fortunate. As a young researcher, he set out to

study what happened when he injected rats with endocrine extracts. He was a klutz, dropping his animals and

chasing them around the lab with a broom. Almost all his rats-even the ones he shot up with presumably harmless

saline-developed ulcers, overgrown adrenal glands and immune dysfunction. To his credit, Selye didn't regard this

finding as evidence he had failed. Instead, he decided he was onto something.

Selye's rats weren't responding to the chemicals he was injecting. They were responding to his clumsiness with

the needle. They didn't like being dropped and poked and bothered. He was stressing them out. Selye called the

rats' condition "general adaptation syndrome," a telling term that reflected the reason the stress response had

evolved in the first place: in life-or-death situations, it was helpful.

For a rat, there's no bigger stressor than an encounter with a lean and hungry cat. As soon as the rat's brain

registers danger, it pumps itself up on hormones-first adrenaline, then cortisol. The surge helps mobilize energy to

the muscles, and it also primes several parts of the brain, temporarily improving some types of memory and fine-

tuning the senses. Thus armed, the rat makes its escape-assuming the cat, whose brain has also been flooded

with stress hormones by the sight of a long-awaited potential meal, doesn't outrun or outwit it.

This cascade of chemicals is what we refer to as "stress." For rats, the triggers are largely limited to physical

threats from the likes of cats and scientists. But in humans, almost anything can start the stress response.

Battling traffic, planning a party, losing a job, even gaining a job-all may get the stress hormones flowing as freely

as being attacked by a predator does. Even the prospect of future change can set off our alarms. We think,

therefore we worry.

Herein lies a problem. A lot of us tend to flip the stress-hormone switch to "on" and leave it there. At some point,

the neurons get tired of being primed, and positive effects become negative ones. The result is the same decline in

health that Selye's rats suffered. Neurons shrivel and stop communicating with each other, and brain tissue

shrinks in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which play roles in learning, memory and rational thought.

"Acutely, stress helps us remember some things better," says neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller

University. "Chronically, it makes us worse at remembering other things, and it impairs our mental flexibility."

These chronic effects may disappear when the stressor does. In medical students studying for exams, the medial

prefrontal cortex shrinks during cram sessions but grows back after a month off. The bad news is that after a

stressful event, we don't always get a month off. Even when we do, we may spend it worrying ("Sure, the test is

over, but how did I do?"), and that's just as biochemically bad as the original stressor. This is why stress is linked to

depression and Alzheimer's; neurons weakened by years of exposure to stress hormones are more susceptible to

killers. It also suggests that those of us with constant stress in our lives should be reduced to depressed, forgetful

wrecks. But most of us aren't. Why?

Step away from the lab, and you'll find the beginnings of an answer. In the 1970s and '80s, Salvatore Maddi, a

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psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, followed 430 employees at Illinois Bell during a companywide

crisis. While most of the workers suffered as their company fell apart-performing poorly on the job, getting

divorced and developing high rates of heart attacks, obesity and strokes- a third of them fared well. They stayed

healthy, kept their jobs or found others quickly. It would be easy to assume these were the workers who'd grown up

in peaceful, privileged circumstances. It would also be wrong. Many of those who did best as adults had had fairly

tough childhoods. They had suffered no abuse or trauma but "maybe had fathers in the military and moved around

a lot, or had parents who were alcoholics," says Maddi. "There was a lot of stress in their early lives, but their

parents had convinced them that they were the hope of the family-that they would make everyone proud of them-

and they had accepted that role. That led to their being very hardy people." Childhood stress, then, had been good

for them-it had given them something to transcend.

More recently, Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University has studied a similar phenomenon in alpha males. He's seen

plenty of "totally insane son of a bitch" types who respond to stress by lashing out, but he's also interested in

another type that gets less press: the nice guy who finishes first. These alphas don't often get into fights; when

they do, they pick battles they know they can win. They're just as dominant as their angry counterparts, and they're

subject to the same stressors-power struggles, unsuccessful sexual overtures, the occasional need to slap down a

subordinate-but their hormone levels never get out of whack for long, and they probably don't suffer much stress-

induced brain dysfunction. Sapolsky likes to joke that they've all been relaxing in hot tubs in Big Sur, transforming

themselves into "minimalist Zen masters." This is a joke because they've clearly come by their attitudes

unconsciously: Sapolsky studies wild baboons.

Sapolsky's and Maddi's work points to a flaw with much of the neurobiological research: so far, it has done a poor

job of accounting for differences in how individuals process stress. Researchers haven't identified the point at

which the effects of stress tip over from positive to negative, and they know little about why that point differs from

person to person. (This is why they don't like to tell people that a little stress can be good, says Rabin-because "we

don't know how to judge for each individual what a 'little' stress is.") The research thus tends to paint stress as a

universal phenomenon, even though we all experience it differently. "If there are rats or mice or cultured neurons in

a dish that seem superresilient to stress, far too many lab scientists view this as a pain in the ass, something that

just throws off patterns," says Sapolsky. "It's only people who are tuned into animal behavior or humans and the

real world who are interested in how amazing the outliers are." Explaining these outliers' healthy attitudes, says

Sapolsky, is now "the field's biggest challenge."

As Maddi's work makes clear, a lot of the explanation stems from early experiences. This may be true of Sapolsky's

baboons as well. Sapolsky suspects that part of what makes an animal a dominant Zen master instead of an angry

alpha lies in what sort of childhood he had. If an adult baboon picks up on conflict around him but keeps his cool,

"quelling the anxiety and exercising impulse control," that may be behavior his mom modeled for him years earlier.

The key? Factors such as how many steps the baby baboon could take away from his mother before she pulled

him back-i.e., how much she allowed him to learn for himself, even if that meant a few bumps and bruises along

the way. "I think the males who had mothers who were less anxious, who allowed them to be more exploratory in

the absence of agitated maternal worry, are more likely to be the Zen ones who are calm enough to resist

provocation," he says. A little properly handled stress, then, may be necessary to turn children into well-adjusted

adults.

Part of the explanation will also be found in genes. Scientists have already identified one that helps control how

the brain processes serotonin; some variants seem to protect people from depression, depending on whether

they've suffered through previous traumas. This gene may not mediate everyday stress, but others are bound to be

fingered eventually, and "once people have found scores of genes," says Sapolsky, "I'm willing to bet the farm that

that's going to begin to explain who gets depressed after disastrous unrequited love and who just feels lousy for

two weeks."

The X and Y chromosomes also play a role in how people respond to stress, though how much of one isn't clear.

Men and women both experience stress as a rise in adrenaline and cortisol. What differs is their reaction. Women

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"are more likely to turn to their social networks, and that prompts the release of oxytocin, which mutes the stress

systems," says Shelley Taylor, a psychologist at UCLA. If they're surrounded by loved ones when a stressor arises,

she says, "there's some evidence they don't even show as much of the initial hormonal response." Without that

response, there's less risk of long-term harm to the brain. It's a critical concept-yet it wasn't on stress

physiologists' radar until the mid-'90s, when Taylor pointed out that most stress research in animals and humans

had been conducted overwhelmingly on males.

Finally, there's that murky territory where genes and environment interact, with lifelong effects: the womb. It's not

hard to find studies suggesting that maternal stress harms later child development. But what the evidence means,

no one knows. "Project Ice Storm," a survey of nearly 150 expectant mothers who toughed out a 1998 squall in

Quebec-some without power for up to 40 days-is one of the scariest studies. Late last year researchers reported

that the women's children had lower-than-average IQs and language skills at age 5; they say the storm and its

stress on the mothers had "significant effects [on the children] ... in every area of development that we have

examined." The study surveys many children in great detail, but it doesn't mean all pregnant women should panic

about their stress levels (or panic about the fact that they've just panicked). An ice storm isn't the same kind of

stressor that people encounter in everyday life, and the women in the ice-storm study don't necessarily represent

all women. Those who were stuck in Quebec during the storm were likely some of the ones with the fewest

resources. Their children may have been prone to low scores as 5-year-olds simply because they were poor.

A lot of the research on stress and infant development can be picked apart this way, says DiPietro, of Johns

Hopkins. Also, she notes, "nobody ever got funded by saying stress doesn't harm babies." DiPietro herself is a rare

exception. Two years ago, she showed that women under moderate stress in mid-to-late pregnancy wound up with

toddlers who were developmentally advanced, scoring highly on language and cognitive tests. In an upcoming

paper, she confirms the trend: 2-week-old babies whose mothers were under moderate stress show evidence of

faster nerve transmission-and possibly more mature brain development-than those whose moms had stress-free

pregnancies. It's hard to know what to make of the findings, but DiPietro has an intriguing theory. A stressed-out

mother's "internal environment"-her heartbeat, blood pressure and other signals the fetus can perceive-is

constantly in flux. Her restlessness may stimulate the fetus's brain, giving it something to think about. In this light,

DiPietro thinks, the kind of mild to moderate stress that is pervasive in many women's hectic lives may be

beneficial, perhaps even "essential," for fetal development. The idea is controversial-but if it's correct, it certainly

complicates the theory that stress can permanently damage a child in utero.

When Stanford's Sapolsky gives lectures on stress, he cites the "depressing" research on failing neurons, some of

which he has conducted. But his talks end optimistically, thanks to his observations in the wild. "If some baboons

just happen to be good at seeing water holes as half full instead of half empty ... we should be able to as well," he

once told an audience. Even if we're not born well equipped to deal with stress, he said, "we can change," because

as humans, we ought to be "wise enough to keep this stuff in perspective."

So how do we do that? One place to start is with the human equivalent of Zen baboons: Buddhist monks. Their

mental stability and calmness isn't mystical; it's biological. The brain can grow new cells and reshape itself, and

meditation appears to encourage this process. Monks who have trained for years in meditation have greater brain

activity in regions linked to learning and happiness. "The mind is far more malleable than we previously assumed,"

says Saki Santorelli, executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the

University of Massachusetts Medical School. Studies at the center have shown that meditation can help people

cope with stress. It may repair or compensate for damage already done to the brain.

Not all of us want to or can become monks; not all of us can spare even eight weeks for a course at the Center for

Mindfulness. But there are quicker ways to learn to harness and handle stress. For this article, I tried one: the

Williams LifeSkills program, a cognitive mini-makeover based on the research of Duke University psychiatrist

Redford Williams. LifeSkills teaches adherents to approach life like a Zen baboon, picking the right battles-and it

can be completed in a day and a half. "You won't achieve enlightenment, but it will help you," Williams told me

before I embarked on the course, which gave me a formula for assessing conflicts (How important is this to me?

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Should I be mad? Can I do something about the problem? Would that be worth the trouble?). He was right. I did feel

a bit calmer afterward. But then, I had willed myself to. I liked Williams; I was hoping his program would work.

This is the problem with all stress-management tactics: you have to want them to succeed and be willing to throw

yourself into them, or they'll fail. If you force yourself to do them, you'll just stress yourself out more. This is why

exercise relieves stress for some people and makes others miserable. It's also why Sapolsky says he's "totally

frazzled" but doesn't bother with meditation: "If I had to do that for 30 minutes a day," he says, "I'm pretty sure I'd

have a stroke."

For all of the science's shortfalls, there's animal research that suggests why something that should lower stress

can actually cause stress if it's done in the wrong spirit. In a classic study, scientists put two rats in a cage, each of

them locked in a running wheel. The first rat could exercise whenever he liked. The second was yoked to the first,

forced to run when his counterpart did. Exercise, like meditation, usually tamps down stress and encourages

neuron growth, and indeed, the first rat's brain bloomed with new cells. The second rat, however, lost brain cells.

He was doing something that should have been good for his brain, but he lacked one crucial factor: control. He

could not determine his own "workout" schedule, so he didn't perceive it as exercise. Instead, he experienced it as a

literal rat race.

This experiment brings up a troubling point about stress. Psychologists have known for years that one of the

biggest factors in how we process stressful events is how much control we have over our lives. As a rule, if we feel

we're in control, we cope. If we don't, we collapse. And no amount of meditation or reframing our thinking can

change certain facts of our lives. With the market languishing and jobs hemorrhaging and the world going to hell,

too many of us probably feel like that rat in the second wheel: it's hard to convince ourselves we're in control of

anything.

But stress science even provides a little hope here, if we go back to Selye. He first published his ideas during the

Great Depression-a time of stress if ever there was one, and a time in which survival demanded creativity. That

Depression ended. Now we're entering what may be a new one, and we'll need more creative thinking to get out of

it. We're going to have to figure out what parts of our future we can control, and we'll need to engage with them

thoughtfully. Fortunately, we have the kind of brain that permits that. Sure, it will be stressful. Maybe that isn't a

bad thing. DETAILS

Subject: Stress; Medical research; Health

Publication title: Newsweek; New York

Volume: 153

Issue: 8

Pages: n/a

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Feb 23, 2009

Section: Health

Publisher: Newsweek Media Group Inc

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Place of publication: New York

Country of publication: United States

Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals--United States, Political Science

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