Stress and Health
By Hymie Anisman and Kimberly Matheson
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is not just intriguing, but speaks to the many conditions and experiences that can influence how we live our lives. It likewise reflects the findings of research that focuses on factors that affect vulnerability or resilience to the effects of stressful experiences and the consequences on physical and mental health.
Most people (likely all people) encounter various stressors. These may comprise events that are uncontrollable, unpredictable, chronic, and intractable, whereas others are relatively modest, transient and evoke mild emotional reactions. As well, there are considerable differences in the impact of stressors on individuals’ behavioral and neurobiological responses. Such differences might stem from how people perceive, appraise, and interpret their experiences. But even if they appraise a stressor in a similar way, owing to numerous psychosocial and life experiences, they might use different strategies to cope. Even if they cope in similar ways, the adaptive biological responses called upon to maintain well-being may differ across people. Thus, the outcomes in response to stressors that emerge can differ substantially between individuals for a whole variety of reasons.
In the 2nd edition of ‘An Introduction to Stress and Health’, we outline some of the factors that influence vulnerability to various mental and physical health disturbances that stem from stressor experiences, as well as those that foster resilience. The brain is a versatile organ that influences the functioning of multiple organs and protective systems. Through actions on hormones, brain neurotransmitters, and glial processes, as well as growth factors essential for synaptic plasticity, stressors can promote psychological and physical pathologies. Conversely, by affecting peripheral processes (including inflammatory immune and microbial alterations), stress and lifestyle factors influence brain functioning and limit the emergence of psychopathology. Ordinarily, multiple adaptive responses are engendered in response to stressors, but these protective biological processes may be overwhelmed by chronic challenges (allostatic overload), increasing vulnerability to pathological outcomes.
Irrespective of the nature of the stressors encountered, their actions on neurobiological processes and hence illness occurrence are moderated by developmental and psychosocial factors. The dance between psychosocial and biological processes ultimately may promote or exacerbate diverse physical and psychological illnesses. More than this, ongoing stressors and biological outcomes can have effects that are transmitted across generations. Being born into poverty, through the lack of functional resources available or environmental exposures, can result in the ensuing generations of children being disadvantaged. Likewise, epigenetic changes engendered by negative experiences can potentially be transmitted transgenerationally. These may be the result of individual traumas or the collective historical trauma experience of whole societies, such as Indigenous Peoples in many regions of the world. At the same time, the capacity to adapt to such exposures might be the basis for fostering transgenerational strengths.
In this book, we introduce the effects of stressors in both animals and humans, in an effort to best portray the processes related to vulnerability and resilience to illness. Studies in many animal species have been essential in delineating the neurobiological and immunological processes by which stressors can affect health, as well as methods to attenuate these actions, even if this research isn’t always easily translated to human conditions. Animal studies can only go so far in our understanding of how stressors can affect us. Rodents studied in a laboratory context, for instance, might not encounter shame and humiliation that humans too often endure, nor do they experience the chronic unpredictable devastation exacted by natural disasters as well as wars or other human-inflicted traumas, such as abuse, violence, and racism. By examining the impact of diverse stressors on behavioral, neurobiological, immunological, and microbial processes in animal models, and considering the developmental and psychosocial elements that moderate stress responses in humans, it becomes possible to define the mechanisms associated with physical, emotional, and cognitive disturbances that result from stressful events, and may point to potential methods of attenuating these.
Book Details
An Introduction to Stress and Health
Hymie Anisman and Kimberly Matheson
December 2022
ISBN: 9781529778717
About the Authors
