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.
We all know the feeling of growing old before our time, for a while. Some days the kids can make a young mother feel like Grandma. Some bosses and some jobs drive us into early retirement at 55 or 60. Then we feel young again and find a second career. Every president goes grey or greyer in the Oval Office. Without term limits, the better ones would die in that office.
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.
An unexpected experience forced on me a stunning reminder of how much our brain relies on a functioning gut to do its most basic tasks: listen, remember, talk, write. I had plenty of time that week to think about the conversation going on between my gastrointestinal system and my central nervous system.
