The Medical and Neurological Effects of Stress
/The major medical manifestations of stress are headaches, stomach upsets and back pain. These conditions can of course be caused by some form of physical trauma or ingested foreign body - stress is by no means the only culprit. But in the absence of a physical agent, mental stress is likely to be at the root. The body reacts (experiences pain) to having stored up the stresses and unexpressed emotions for a period of time, until it has to demand attention (rest or treatment) through rendering its owner incapable of work.
We become jumpy, easily spooked, ‘on the edge’ – in this heightened state the merest hint of threat can set us off. This is why people get into states of near paranoia. A CEO client recounted how, despite truly Herculaen signals and evidence from her Chairman that she was fully supported, valued and thought to be doing all the right things, she lived in fear of being sacked. Irrational, yet undeniable and unconquerable. It culminated in being asked to meet her Chairman late one afternoon, and her enduring the discussion simply waiting for the axe to fall. When it didn’t, since the meeting was wholly positive and supportive, my client came away still believing that her fate had been decided but that the Chairman had bottled it! Insanity!
A VP client recounted the story of feeling so unwell at a company offsite (one that he had organised for his own leadership team!) that he travelled all the way back from London to his home in another country on auto-pilot – literally unable to recall any of the journey, save for one hazy recollection of finding himself sat on the floor in the middle of the departure hall in Terminal 5 of Heathrow, being surrounded by concerned airport staff, and being helped through security. He collapsed the moment he walked in through his front door, and spent a week in bed. This client is very successful, hugely respected by his team and his boss alike. So where did the extreme stress come from?
One can only conclude that so much of the stress in today’s managers is utterly self generated, but that would be to deny the power of the system, and to place too simplistic a responsibility on individuals to ‘grow up and snap themselves out of it’. Corporatism is creating a form of mass hypnosis, and although it’s defenders will argue that the system cannot be blamed, that is the start of the witch-hunt to find the scapegoats. If the defenders of Corporatism accept that this extreme self generated stress is endemic, then they must seek to analyse why and how it happens.
So how does it happen? There is a lot of research now centring on inflammation being the critical factor in neurologically based conditions. When parts of the brain become inflamed, they cease to function normally, as with any other part of the body that experiences damage. But with the brain, we are unable to use the inflammation as a signal for us to act to repair the damage, and so the inflammation, unnoticed and unattended, goes on to cause greater and greater damage.
On external parts of our anatomy, inflammation is visible to us due to abrasion or redness, plus we experience pain or discomfort that is clearly physically located. Even when the inflammation is internal, we still feel pain from the area concerned. So we seek medical assistance or we bathe and dress the wound ourselves, and we also make adjustments to our daily routines to give the inflamed area time to heal. This strategy has served us beautifully throughout our evolutionary history. But as Caroline Williams says “modern life is stacked against this delicate balance. Obesity, stress, pollution, bad diet and aging can all tip us into a low-level state of inflammation that, rather than being confined to a specific tissue, keeps the entire body in a perpetual state of readiness for a threat that never comes”. (June 2017)
The problem with the brain however is not just that we cannot see the inflammation, its that we simply don’t know that we are suffering, since there are no pain receptors in the brain. We may experience headaches when the inflammation has been left long enough to run riot, but headaches are pains felt not in the brain, but in the muscles of the head, in the dura (the membranes between the skull and the brain) and in the nerves in the scalp.
Andy Coghlan writes frequently on the effects of stress on our bodies and our brains. In a November 2017 article “How Bullying Can Lead to Depression” he writes:
‘Experiences like bullying make the blood brain barrier leaky, leading to brain inflammation and leaving you vulnerable to depression. Anything that threatens your sense of worth is a type of social stress………..for example a hostile work environment. First the stress kicks off inflammation in the bloodstream. This weakens the blood-brain barrier which normally protects the brain, making it more likely to let substances in. This enables large molecules like inflammatory substance interleukin-6 and aggressive white blood cells called monocytes to pass into the brain. Here they seem to disrupt signalling in the nucleus accumbens, which helps evaluate threats and rewards.’ (November 2017)
Aggressive, warlike language, so beloved of the Corporate leadership rhetoric lexicon, actually serves to supress the immune system.
So our brains are secretly suffering, throwing our normal cognitive functioning out of kilter. As Caroline Williams concludes,
‘The hormone noradrenaline, which is released in anticipation of an impending life or death situation, sets off the same chain of events as an infection or injury. Yet although stresses passed quickly in our evolutionary past, these days many of us are walking around with a ticking time bomb of stress-induced inflammation that never quite goes away.’ (June 2017)
Article excerpted from “Corporate Emotional Intelligence - Being Human in a Corporate World” - by Gareth Chick
