A story about stress
Once upon a time, on a cold winter’s day in Vienna in 1907, a surgeon and his office administrator (who was also his wife) welcomed a son. They doted on the boy who was precocious with a strong intellectual curiosity.
The boy was confident (some might say arrogant) and competitive. After studying biochemistry, he went to medical school. He noticed during his rounds that patients often had similar complaints even though they were suffering from different diseases.
These generic complaints were referred to by other doctors as “the syndrome of just being sick” and included things like looking tired, having no appetite, and preferring to lie down instead of stand.
Ten years later, the man (because he definitely was no longer a boy) began working in a laboratory injecting extracts from cow ovaries into female rats (the laboratory was trying to understand female sex hormones continue to remain a mystery).
When he performed autopsies on the rats, he discovered some interesting things that had nothing to do with the cow ovary extracts. Enlarged adrenal glands. Atrophied lymphatic systems. Peptic ulcers.
He realized what these rats all had in common were the injections, so he placed the rats in other situations that weren’t ideal, like exposing them to an extremely cold rooftop setting and making them run on a treadmill. When he performed autopsies on these rats he found similar results.
He realized the rats were experiencing events that were throwing them out of homeostasis. Homeostasis is how you self-regulate biologically to maintain stability.
Stress in physics refers to the force acting on a unit of material. He adopted the term stress in the context of a living creature to mean “a non-specific response given by the body to any request made to it.”
He went on to publish more than 1600 papers and 40 books. He turned his house into the International Institute of Stress.His name was Hans Selye and the word stress when applied to a living organism would go on to mean a lot of different things in a lot of different contexts.
Based on the original definition, stress isn’t good or bad. What matters is your ability to return to homeostasis.
Reflection:
Does your movement practice build in an opportunity to recover? Does it challenge you enough that it feels like recovery is necessary? or is it a low level grind that consistently moves you away from your place of center?
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