the culture of stress-FREEDOM is optional
I used to make an analogy to illustrate the difference between an egalitarian social group pursuing stress-freedom versus a highly hierarchical one that cultivates dominance through aggression by comparing the two groups to bonobos vs. chimpanzees as we know them from studies and articles which all insist that the differences are hardwired in the animals’ brains, like the article published in the Washington Post.
Watching ‘Stress, Portrait of a Killer – Full Doc 2008 by National Geographic’ ( a 15 minutes version is also available) I’m not so sure about the hard wiring. If baboons can change their culture so radically from aggressive into peaceful why could humans not do it, too?
True, for the baboons the cultural change was only possible after the aggressive stressor jerks of the community were killed by their own damaged immune systems (and some infected meat stolen from humans)…
Epicurus and his friends did not wait for all the aggressive human bullies to kill themselves but formed intentional alternative communities for the cultivation of human flourishing through stress-FREEDOM and friendship.
In fact, in our own days, too, more and more human groups are opting out from the majority’s aggressive hierarchical competitive structures and build alternative communities with different structures, like the 200 year old ordered anarchy on Tristan da Cunha or the hundreds of intentional communities in the US and West Europe.
stress may cause stroke
New research discovers a strong link between stress and ischemic cerebral vascular accidents, popularly known as strokes.
Read more here:
http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/10/05/beware-of-intense-stress/8755.html
be aware of the devastating effects of stress on our health and happiness
I wish to inform and warn as many people as possible against the devastating effects of stress on our health and happiness so I have sent out a mail to all my friends and acquaintances and invited them to download a free copy of my stress-report “How We Worry Ourselves Sick: A Revealing Report on the Devastating Effects of Stress on Our Health and Happiness,”
Tumorigenesis: Stress and cancer
Chronic stress has been suggested to increase tumor growth, but the mechanism has remained unclear. Anil Sood and colleagues have now shown that -adrenergic signaling mediates increased angiogenesis and tumor growth in a mouse model.
The authors used nude mice that had been inoculated with human ovarian carcinoma cells, and the mice were stressed by being immobilized for several hours a day. Stressed mice had a three-fourfold increase in the number of tumor nodules and tumor weight; they also had more metastases. These results were replicated using other tumor cell lines and another method of stressing the mice.
The stressed mice had larger adrenal glands and greater sympathetic nervous system activity than the controls, so the authors investigated whether the effect of stress on tumor growth is mediated by -adrenergic receptors. An agonist for 2-adrenergic receptor and a general -adrenergic receptor agonist increased tumor nodule number and tumor weight in a similar manner to chronic stress. Moreover, a -adrenergic antagonist could reverse these effects and the effects of chronic stress itself. By contrast, 1-adrenergic receptor agonists had no effect. [...]
These results show one way in which stress increases tumor growth [...]
Source and full text:http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v6/n9/full/nrc1986.html
Original title: Tumorigenesis: Stress and cancer
Author: Patrick Goymer
FREE Report about stress
Download instantly your copy!