Should we treat stress?
The answer to this question, as for most complex questions, is “it depends.”
For the good and tolerable stresses of daily life, the answer is clearly “no.” By definition, we handle good and tolerable stress well enough without needing to treat it. Forget about the mythical “stress-free life": If that were even possible, it would be bad for your health.
We can be glad that evolution has given us a stress response system that automatically self-regulates the basic functions that keep us alive. Imagine every day trying to figure out your breathing patterns, your heartbeats, your digestion, your sleep, and your responses to pain and pleasure. We go through most of our lives hardly thinking about this everyday miracle of self-regulation.
Though we all talk a lot about stress, most doctors don’t measure stress and don’t know how to treat toxic stress. Even mental health specialists (psychologists, psychiatrists, and other therapists) don’t measure stress in any standard or comprehensive way. No wonder we have a hard time understanding how stress leads to illness and what we can do to change that.
In November 2021 a notable event in the science of heart disease passed unnoticed by the popular press. That, in itself, is not noteworthy, but then two months later the New York Times health columnist Jane Brody called our attention to the publication of a promising article in the November issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that could change the way your heart disease is treated, some day. This is a tale of promise and inertia, or the resistance to change in the practice of medicine.
Modern medicine has given us a lot of advances recently that our grandparents would call miracles. Your worn out knee joint can be replaced in under an hour. You can save your brother’s life--if you’re a good match—by donating your bone marrow, or your kidney, or part of your liver. Miraculous, and yet these miracles happen every day.
