Stress (biology)

“ They are thus more delicately poised and any kind of stress or strain—cerebral, nervous, or muscular—is more likely to produce serious disturbance and requires an accurate adjustment to their special needs. ”

“ And now, one final word in conclusion, for the purpose of drawing together, as it were, the multiplicity of threads which constitute the complex skein of causes and effects, with their remedial measures which cover the wide range of human life's vicissitudes—the interruptions of its would-be harmonies—which take the forms, all too common in these times of stress, of physical disturbance and of mental strain which come to us in the combined and threatening guise of suffering and disease. ”

“ When these facts respecting the direct physical action of various toxical agents on the body, through the line of the involuntary nervous system, are understood, they connect, through the same direction, the effects of more refined and much less definable influences. They show how psychological phases are ever at hand to modify nutritive changes: how grief, which shocks and dissevers the organic nervous supply, affects the animal life so deleteriously, exciting and reducing, and sometimes in part disabling altogether parts of the organic nervous track. ”

“ Whatever compels greater wear and tear of the nervous system proves inimical to the reproductive function. The strain and stress of co-ordination with novel circumstances and novel relations affect most injuriously the organic balance. ”

“ I only know,” he said, getting up and looking angrily at the doctor—“I only know that God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed! If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every stimulus. And I do! To pain I respond with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is just what is called life. The lower the organism, the less sensitive it is, and the more feebly it reacts to stimulus; and the higher it is, the more responsively and vigorously it reacts to reality. ”

“ Observe, first, how numerous are the effects which any marked change works upon an adult organism—a human being, for instance. An alarming sound or sight, besides the impressions on the organs of sense and the nerves, may produce a start, a scream, a distortion of the face, a trembling consequent upon a general muscular relaxation, a burst of perspiration, an excited action of the heart, a rush of blood to the brain, followed possibly by arrest of the heart's action and by syncope: and if the system be feeble, an indisposition with its long train of complicated symptoms may set in. ”

“ When we reflect that the nervous system of the animal life and the system of the great sympathetic govern all the vital operations, and that the regularity of these latter is absolutely dependent on the orderly performance of their functions by the centres wherein are found the prime springs and the fundamental activities of the animal economy, we conceive at once how countless diseases may arise out of disturbances produced by an abuse or an excess of the passions. ”

“ Great stress, or anxiety, or fear, may in two weeks' or even in two days' time so work its ravages that the person looks ten years or even twenty years older. A person has been long given to worry, or perhaps to worry in extreme form though not so long—a well-defined case of indigestion and general stomach trouble, with a generally lowered and sluggish vitality, has become pronounced and fixed.
Any type of thought that prevails in our mental lives will in time produce its correspondences in our physical lives. ”

“ It is proverbially difficult to exhaust or to kill this animal by trauma. The brain and other phylogenetically sheltered parts likewise give no exhausting self-protective nerve-muscular response to trauma. ”

“ Thus, to the other causes of degeneration in animal life and structure, we may append that which takes origin from the extreme or excessive development of one function over another. Physiological development in one direction, overstepping the natural and ordinary limits, runs concurrently with destruction of life's equilibrium, and naturally tends to produce degeneration and simplification of other organs and other duties of life. ”

“ Were changes of structure really as rapid at this period, it would imply vital depression, just as we see it in plants and animals taking on rapid growth, and just as we see impaired mental and bodily energy follow sudden and excessive exercise of any organ in a member of the human family. ”

“ If on the other hand, the food-supply is inadequate, if the sleep allowance has been cut short, whether by the demands of work or by those of fashion, if the body has been starved of oxygen and deprived of sunlight, if the whole system has been kept on the rack, whether in the sweatshop, or in the furnace of affliction, what is the effect on the nervous system? Just what might have been expected. The sense-organs shy, like a frightened horse, at every shadow or fluttering leaf. ”

“ We now turn our attention to animal sensation, in order to observe the difference between it and the receptivity of the plant. The animal, containing within itself the organism of the plant, its organic functions must, like those of the plant, be liable to be modified by external influences. This property in the plant we have termed irritability, because irritation immediately causes and calls forth re-action. In the animal, however, the nervous life (as the expression and type of unity, which embraces all the parts of the organism and forms them into a whole.) ”

“ But, since in the course of strenuous life any organ is from time to time subject to an abnormal amount of strain, it must be fitted to respond to a super-normal call on its strength and functional activity. ”

“ From the irregularity of the circulation of the blood induced by prolonged grief, varied central phenomena in the nervous matter follow, and in persons who have passed middle life these phenomena are usually permanent if not progressive. They consist of organic feebleness extending to all the active organs of the body, and affecting specially the mental organism, A constant desire for rest, for avoidance of cares, for seclusion, mark this stage of disease, if so it may be called. ”

“ Selecting Our Sensations
Reaction and Over-Reaction. Every organism, if it is to live, must be normally sensitive to its environment. It must possess the power of response to stimuli. As the sea-anemone curls up at touch, and as the tiny baby blinks at the light, so must every living thing be able to sense and to react to the presence of a dangerous or a friendly force. Only by a certain degree of irritability can it survive in the struggle for existence. ”

“ The prostrate vitality rises against a deadly foe, as a weary sleeper would start at the touch of a serpent; and, as danger will momentarily overcome the feeling of fatigue, the organism labors with restless energy till the poison is expelled. ”

“ But as soon as the problem of expurgation has been solved, a debilitating reaction sets in; the organism sinks under the exhausting after-effects of the unnatural irritant, the mind is clouded by lingering poison-fumes, the depression of vital energy avenges itself by protracted languor, and the misery of mental gloom. ”

“ When the stress of environment exceeds the limits of idioplasmic elasticity, its influence brings about permanent variations, which are imperceptibly small, it is true, in the single individual, but which, when the stimulus is active for a long period of time in the same manner, increase to perceptible magnitude. ”

“ Let us here parenthetically notice that the physiological tendency in the nervous system is an evolved complication and a specialized development of one of the fundamental properties of protoplasm—that which is often spoken of as irritability. ”

“ We have now presented some of the reasons based largely on gross animal behavior why fear is to be regarded as a response to phylogenetic association with physical danger. In further support of this hypothesis, I shall now present some clinical and experimental evidence. Although there is not convincing proof, yet there is evidence that the effect of the stimulus of fear upon the body when unaccompanied by physical activity is more injurious than is an actual physical contest which results in fatigue without gross physical injury. ”

“ The relaxed and debilitated body and nerves are at once rebraced, restored, enlivened, and built up. The mental and physical symptoms of all disease vanish together under its influence—the stooping trembling victim of depression or debility becomes a new man ”

“ For, although, in the point of view of knowledge or intellect, the five senses are the really important approaches to the mind, yet, in the view of feeling or pleasure and pain, the omission of the varied organic susceptibility leaves a wide gap in the handling of the subject. Some of our very strongest pleasures and pains grow out of the region of organic life—the digestion, circulation, respiration, muscular and nervous integrity or derangement.
In exerting influence over human beings this department of sensibility is a first resource. ”

“ All such changes of structure, whether extremely slight or strongly marked, which appear among many individuals living together, may be considered as the in definite effects of the conditions of life on each individual organism, in nearly the same manner as the chill effects different men in an in definite manner, according to their state of body or constitution, causing coughs or colds, rheumatism, or inflammation of various organs. ”

“ There is not properly a temperament, or predisposition to disease, from decreased sensibility, since irritability and not sensibility is immediately necessary to bodily health. Hence it is the excess of sensation alone, as it is the defect of irritation, that most frequently produces disease. This temperament of increased sensibility is known from the increased activity of all those motions of the organs of sense and muscles, which are exerted in consequence of pleasure or pain, as in the beginning of drunkenness, and in inflammatory fever. ”

“ In the third stage there is paralysis of function of most of the muscular, secretory, excretory, circulatory, intestinal, and nervous systems. The animal is petrified with fear, and falls into a state of paralysis, rigidity, cataplexy, or in a state simulating death. This last stage of the effects of the fear instinct is pathological, and instead of conducing to the good of the individual, really leads to his destruction and death. The fear instinct in its extreme cases is not a help to the organism, but is distinctly a hindrance, and is felt as such by the organism which experiences it. ”

“ Under the repeated strain of the continually increasing doses, which have to be taken to renew the desired effect, the nervous system finally becomes exhausted, and mind and body are utterly and hopelessly wrecked. ”

“ The typical appearances of human beings, as well as lower animals, when in the grip of such deeply agitating emotions as fear and rage, are so well recognized as to constitute a primitive and common means of judging the nature of the experience through which the organism is passing. This “pattern” response of the nervous system to an emotion-provoking object or situation is probably capable of bringing into action a much greater number of neurones in the central nervous system than are likely to be concerned in even a supreme act of volition. ”

“ Some animal propensities may be indulged to such excess as to produce a constant tendency of the blood to a certain portion of the brain, and to the organs connected with it, and thus cause a constant and excessive excitement, which finally becomes a disease. Sometimes a paralysis of this portion of the brain results from such an entire exhaustion of the nervous fountain and of the overworked nerves. ”

“ Many years later the study of physiology revealed to me my sin, and carried instruction with it. The organism of the animal was injured and rendered miserable by the dirt, and nervous irritability, akin to insanity, was the result. This example I subsequently applied to the case of the human poor, and saw in the deleterious physical condition in which many of them habitually live the cause of some of their sufferings and crimes. ”

“ You may rest them by a change of the thought habit each day, by relaxation, by sleep, and by suggestions made in this book.
There are few advance danger signals shown by the nervous systems, and in this there is a marked difference between the nerves and the organic system.
If you abuse your stomach, head, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys or eyes, you have distress and pain.
The nervous energy is like a barrel of water; you can draw water from the faucet at the bottom until you have almost exhausted the contents.
Nature mends ordinary nerve waste each day, like the rains replenish the cistern. ”

“ In persons habituated to bodily difficulty the nervous system becomes gradually braced, and the solids attain that state of rigidity which banishes irritability, while the mind, accustomed to danger, loses that timidity which frequently leads to the dreaded disaster. ”

“ We observe in this list that fear not only affects the mind and the nervous and muscular tissues, but the molecular chemical transformations of the organic network, even to the skin, the hair, and the teeth. ”

“ For every affection of the mind that is attended with either pain88 or pleasure, hope or fear, is the cause of an agitation whose influence extends to the heart, and there induces change from the natural constitution, in the temperature, the pulse and the rest, which impairing all nutrition in its source and abating the powers at large, it is no wonder that various forms of incurable disease in the extremities and in the trunk are the consequence, inasmuch as in such circumstances the whole body labours under the effects of vitiated nutrition and a want of native heat. ”