Work Stress Can Kill You...But Try Not To Worry

A twelve year long British study involving 10,000 subject has concluded that work-related stress can kill. I'm not talking about the the quiet guy that always seemed so nice and talked to his plants snapping and going postal kind of lethal work stress. Sure we've all heard for a long time that stress is unhealthy, that's a no brainer. The significance of this study is that it is one of the first to actually link the stress to real biological changes to the body.

One of the findings that I thought particularly interesting was that "stressed workers had...higher-than-normal levels of cortisol, a "stress" hormone that provides a burst of energy for a fight-or-flight response." Gee, there's that fight or flight response again. I know I've said this before but it bears repeating. Modern human lifestyles are fighting our evolutionary background. We're still physically hardwired for primitive reactions that served us well in helping to keep the species alive. Now those same primitive reactions in a sense, are killing us. Back in the day if a guy was in danger and the fight or flight response was primed by his endocrine system which filled his body with "stress" hormones - he actually got to fight or flee. Now the saber-toothed tiger is your asshole of a boss. The hostile caveman from the neighboring clan is the schmuck from Acquisitions that's citing regulations to deny your request to buy STRESS BALLS to use to promote your employee assistance counseling program (yeah, that one's real, do I sound bitter?). We walk around constantly primed to fight or flee but we never get the chance to do it. Hormones are the chemicals that control the system. If you mess with the chemicals, you mess with the system.

On top of that good news, the Wall Street Journal ran an article the other day reporting that "Researchers at Yale have identified a gene mutation for rumination..." No, that's not a disorder that makes people think they're cows. It's "the kind of chronic worry in which people obsess over negative thoughts." The gene is "a variation of a gene known as BDNF that's active in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in thinking and memory." BDNF? Hmmm. Maybe we can use that as a mantra to relax when we start to worry about something. BDNF...BDNF...Big Deal Numb Fuck...

Actually, the thing that caught me in this article was that "the discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that depression involves an inability to control negative thoughts, not just excess emotion." I can speak to this from experience. Given the content of this article I would guess off the top of my head that I have this gene. I've been taking antidepressants for a few years. Now I'm a pretty happy guy. Back then, not so much. Now I have a lot to be happy about. Back then, I still had a lot to be happy about. The difference? Serious problems at work threw me into a serious, full-blown funk. I began wrestling with negative thought patterns. No, wrestling sounds too collegial - something you could get a gold medal for. This was like one of the battle scenes in Braveheart or Lord of the Rings. I still lapse into this way of thinking to a much lesser extent and probably always will but now it's more like a slap fight and I can put those thoughts in time out pretty quickly. Back then, they were kicking my ass. Once it starts you get locked inside your own head in a vicious cycle of negativity, playing out scenarios that haven't happened, and won't happen, then get stressed out and pissed off about them. You actually get angry about something that hasn't happened or more often primed to be angry then direct it at little things that have nothing to do with it. I say cycle but actually, it's a spiral, and it heads down. They say that thoughts become things. Well, if you swirl around the drain long enough and you're always negative, and you act like an ass most of the time, the interesting thing is that those scenarios that play out in your head become self-fulfilling prophesies. So yeah, I think these scientists are right on the money with this one.

The key is, as with many problems, realizing what's going on and finding a way to break the cycle. You gotta find your happy thought...and maybe find a Woolly Mammoth to hunt.