STRESS

Problem. What causes you to feel sick when an illness strikes?

Background. There is a great difference between feeling sick and being sick. Being sick means that some part of the body is being damaged by an infection, a wound, or a deficiency of some kind.

Feeling sick is different. When you feel sick you have a headache, a fever, or some other discomfort. You feel this way when you are getting any of a number of diseases.

Explanation. Dr. Hans Selye noticed that sick people generally complain of the same symptoms when they first contract a disease. Selye wondered what causes these symptoms and why they were similar for so many diseases.

After years of research, he discovered that these feelings of sickness have many causes. They are not limited to physical causes. Emotional factors seem to cause many of the same symptoms. Fear, excitement, anger, or great enthusiasm can cause the symptoms as easily as a cold virus. Selye called all these causes stress.

He performed many experiments on rats. In each, he subjected a group of rats to intense cold, or a virus, or a frustrating situation, and certain reactions developed. The most noticeable were stomach disorders, an enlarged adrenal cortex, and shrunken lymph structures.

Selye realized that these three reactions  could be caused by any stress. Continued stress, however, brought about a second reaction; the internal symptoms disappeared! In cases where there was no disease, but there was stress, the body apparently was able to adjust to the stress and continue to function efficiently. Selye concluded that the body can accustom itself to stress and, if the stress is not too severe, can continue to function.

Selye also found that rats cannot tolerate stress forever. If stress is too severe, they eventually die. Fortunately, people are seldom required to tolerate such extreme degrees of stress.

Most people often experience the first two reactions to stress. Your feeling of sickness when you are first catching cold is your reaction to stress.

You have often experienced the second phase of the stress reaction, too. Remember when you got your "second wind" during a tiring game or long period of activity? That was an adaptation to stress.

Today, doctors are finding out more and more about Dr. Selye’s concept of stress. The more they learn, the better they can treat patients who are experiencing one of the three degrees of stress.