Nobody likes to be stressed out, but certain types of stress may actually be good for you.
Investigators distinguish between passive stress and active stress. People experience passive stress when watching a scary movie, while active stress is what an individual feels when they are busy trying to meet a deadline.
According to the report, active stress boosts the immune system, increasing one's ability to fight off infection.
The researchers evaluated 30 male volunteers who were exposed to two different types of stressful situations. In the active stressful event, volunteers were asked to memorize information and take a 12-minute test. For the passive stressful event, the volunteers watched a 12-minute video of "gruesome" surgical procedures.
During the experiments, each person gave saliva samples that where analyzed for immune system components known as secretory proteins. These proteins help protect the lining of organs such as the lungs and stomach, guarding against the invasion of bacteria and viruses.
While levels of secretory proteins increased during active stress, the immune response actually dropped during passive stress.
Perhaps stress is not the big bad thing everybody is thinking it is -- in fact, most acute stressors boost the immune system. Only when the stress is unusually prolonged or repetitive it becomes a potential threat to health.
One exception is the body's reaction to acute stressors to which there is no way of responding, except to passively endure. These types of stressors, which people might describe by using the phrase "my heart stopped beating," have a rapid and strong suppressive effect on some aspects of immune function.
Instead of advising ways of reducing stress the authors would like people to consider seeking stress: people enjoy and have a natural urge for totally useless and stressful events, such as bungee-jumping, parachuting, and seeking all kinds of thrills and challenges. Such events boost the immune system and may be good to your health.
Psychophysiology September/October 2001;38:836-846
Many people believe that they need less stress in their lives. While some types of stress should clearly be avoided and minimized if at all possible, if we had a stress free existence, life would not go well.
I frequently explain to my patients that this is similar to astronauts. While they are in space they need to exercise two hours every day to compensate for the lack of stress (due to gravity) on their bones. Without this stress their bones would rapidly deteriorate with osteoporosis.
So, stress should not necessarily be avoided.
We will all encounter negative events in our life. W. Clement Stone was an entrepreneur in the US around 100 years ago and he was fond of assuming an "inverse paranoid" position. If anything negative happened to him he believed that there was something good that had to come out of it.
Many times the stresses in our life are able to produce their negative effects due to our own viewpoints. If we shift our thinking to a positive orientation we can frequently eliminate any negative effects from the stress and actually use it to improve our health.
For those who struggle with this approach one of the best tools that I know of is EFT. EFT can rapidly,effectively and permanently eliminate the poor choices that many of us continue to make as a result of previous emotional traumas in our life.
Through extensive research I have found another tool to use in the area of stress management that is a remarkably effective and efficient (and very affordable) way to help you achieve inner peace and significantly reduce stress and anxiety.
The Insight audio CD, which I personally listen to and now recommend to my patients, is an exceptional tool to help you target the daily stresses in your life that act as prime contributors to all forms of diseases.
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