In Depth

Stressed to Kill

Stress is a torture chamber that can't always be avoided. Tortured most are executives with high accountability but low authority. Sound like anyone you know?

By Christopher Koch

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Today, we hate uncertainty every bit as much as our ancestors did. Read the headlines about Sept. 11, the postwar chaos in Iraq, kidnapped children or even that memo from the CEO cutting the security budget (again), and you'll experience the same reactions that our caveman had when he noticed that the tigers had moved from their usual lair: sweaty palms, an elevated heart rate. No doubt the caveman's worries and stress were nearly constant, but he rarely lived long enough to develop stress-related pathologies such as heart disease.

We do. And science is now linking the daily anxieties and worries that cavemen felt to a much more powerful, primitive reaction to stressthe "fight-or-flight response," as researcher Walter Cannon dubbed it in the early 1900s. This is the biological process designed to help a caveman out of serious jams such as a saber-tooth suddenly showing up at the door of the cave. The process is extremely effective for its intended purpose: fighting the tiger or running away.

First, the sight of the tiger signals the brain's speed regulator, the locus coeruleus, to shock the rest of the brain into a state of hyperactivity and alertness. The brain then causes a chemical called norepinephrine to be released into the autonomic, or involuntary, nervous systemturning up the dial on blood pressure and respiration. Simultaneously, cortisol, known as the stress hormone, shoots through the bloodstream to vital systems, turning off those that don't play an immediate role in survival (such as digestion and the immune system) while supercharging others (such as the liver) to provide extra sugar to fuel the brain and muscles. Meanwhile, adrenaline turns up the heart rate and blood flow. It's like gunning the accelerator at a stoplight. The body is revving itself up for what, in the caveman days, was very likely to follow: a life-or-death struggle or a frantic escape.The Wages of StressWe've come to accept stress as a normal part of our lives, but there's nothing normal about lighting up our brains with chemicals and shutting down half the systems in our bodies while flooding the bloodstream with sugar. Today, our bodies don't get much of a break from the stress response, which was designed to be an occasional event, not a constant condition of existence. "We've all come to believe that occasional headaches or muscle tension from stress is normal, but it isn't normal," says Tyne. "A normal body doesn't have headaches."