The History Behind the Science of Stress | Hacker News Reader

The History Behind the Science of Stress

npr.org

49 pointsdrjohnson15 comments

This is a very important story, which I heard on the radio while driving yesterday. Most of what we think we know about stress and its effects on health, and especially about "Type A personality" and health, is skewed by how the research programs were developed in the 1950s through the 1970s. Various forms of adverse environmental influences that can be categorized as "stress" do have general health effects, but not all stress is bad at all levels of stress, and sometimes stress co-occurs with other influences on health that are actually more important than stress itself.

A free article on the Pub Med Central website, "The 'Father of Stress' Meets 'Big Tobacco': Hans Selye and the Tobacco Industry," Am J Public Health. 2011 March; 101(3): 411–418.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3036703/

doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2009.177634

tells more of the background discovered by health researchers digging into the trove of tobacco industry documents that were disclosed as part of the tobacco industry settlement with state governments in 1998.

To avoid the politics, something that turned up in later research is that the thing that correlates to bad outcomes (i.e. heart disease) is hostility more than ambition.

Selye uses the term "stress" with a specific meaning different from the popular conception (he pretty much coined the term as a physiological concept, but it has been co-opted). In his work "stress" is energy demands in excess of the organism's ability to deliver without compromising structure. By energy he means real joules and ATP, not some amorphous psychological reserve.

When people talk about "good stress" and "bad stress" it kinda indicates they don't get the context. What Selye found was that under his definition of stress there is no "good stress." All episodes of stress accumulate indelibly on the organism as aging.

If an activity does not exceed the energy capacity of the organism then it's not stress.

And to think the science of sleep is just really getting started. Stress and sleep are two sides of the same physiological coin and basal responses at that. Sleep well and manage stress to optimize health, productivity, and happiness. Yet, I know I'll spend the next decade showing the data to support that sentence.

We should all hope health wearables arrive sooner. The sooner we get devices that accurately capture and measure personal health data (e.g., stress levels, cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose levels), the sooner we consumers can identify cause-and-effect relationships and determine the optimal behavioral patterns for maintaining health.

It depends on what you want. Accuracy and price are at cross purposes. Our biggest fear is the glut of cheap devices now is undercutting the long-term value for true health applications.

You can have an accurate step counter at a low price. The problem is that the step counter is being sold as a device that knows how well you sleep and how many calories you burn.

A wonderful read on th subject is Robert Sapolsky's "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers": http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780805073690-1

No mention of eustress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustress

What is the objective data to support that concept?

There is a list of references at the bottom of the article.

This article mentions that there was tobacco money and then does a lot of hand waving insinuation that Selye was wrong. I don't think that's the case. As far as I understand it he remains a giant in the field and his work continues to be built on.

Selye was willing to say some people were overstating the role of tobacco in isolation as a cause of disease. So? I happen to think he was right.

I read Sapolsky's "Why Don't Zebras Get Ulcers?" it confirmed Selye's major ideas. It was extensively end-noted with modern research.

What I've read and understood is that the stress associated with low social status (i.e. open plan offices for a programmers, whose work requires more focus and privacy) is extremely toxic (depression, anxiety disorders, cardiovascular load) but that stress itself isn't inherently toxic. For example, if you work 70 hours per week but you enjoy the work, it doesn't hurt your health. Technically speaking, all exercise is stress but not unhealthy (in fact, the opposite).

If anything, our bodies interpret our social status by stress, which means that good stresses (e.g. a workout, a hard problem) can have positive effects.

I don't think it's even controversial that the negative stresses coming from, e.g., open offices and subordinate work contexts, are extremely toxic. It's just that physical stress isn't prima facie dangerous.

I suspect that this varies a lot by person and their internal attitudes. I don't associate open plan offices with low social status, nor do I let other people define what my social status is. As a result, this is not a major source of stress for me. Now, I put all sorts of pressure on myself about living up to my own personal standards, but the particular concerns that you raise and assume are universal barely even register in my head.

I used to get stressed out in open plan offices in my 20s. I was only running at ~25% productivity compared to when I worked on my own projects at home or took the day off and worked from home. The reason I was stressed was because of my own expectations. My employers have never had an issue with my performance. It's just I knew I should be able to get 3-4x as much done each day and I was beating myself up over it.

These days I don't mind that I am much less productive than I could be. I do a couple of hours of really focused work early in the morning before the rest of the office arrives and I use the rest of the day to socialise, network, go to meetings, help the junior devs, and research.

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