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How to Prevent Headache The unbearable bunkness of stress Barry Spencer E verybody talks about stress, and everybody says they have stress, and everybody knows stress is bad for your health. Selye admitted that stress is an abstract concept, and he admitted that stress has never been adaquately defined. Selye's own definition of stress is the non-specific response of the body to any demand. To most people, however, stress is not an abstract concept but is something you feel. The feeling that many people call stress boils down to anxiety and frustration. So the word stress refers to two different things: an abstract concept ("The non-specific response of the body to any demand") and anxiety and frustration. Selye took his cue from Sigmund Freud, who also superimposed invented and totally speculative abstract frameworks of relationships between fictitious entities onto a complex and, at the time, completely mysterious system -- in Freud's case, the human mind -- and then proceeded on the assumption that this invented, superimposed framework was in fact the same as the actual (unknown) mechanism underlying the complex system in question. Thus Freud blamed mental illness on child abuse, and Selye blamed physical illness on modern life. Nobody has been able to detect, locate, measure, or describe stress. Selye admitted, is not a real entity but an abstract concept. Since abstract concepts are not real entities, abstract concepts cannot directly influence objects or events, nor effect, interact with, or alter matter, energy, or systems, or processes involving matter or energy. To suppose that stress can cause disease is to make the logical error of reification or hypostatization (treating an abstract concept as if it was a concrete thing). The second component of stress is anxiety and frustration. When anxiety is associated with illness, people typically commit the logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of this"). Something is concluded to be the cause of the event merely because it happened before the event. The conclusion is unsound because the two things may have the same underlying cause, or the two things may have unrelated causes. People often conclude that when anxiety and frustration, which they call "stress," precedes a migraine headache, the anxiety and frustration ("stress") must have caused the headache. Logically, however, both the "stress" and headache might have the same underlying cause. Much of the anxiety people call stress is caused by caffeine use and by caffeine withdrawal. Can strong emotion such as grief or anger cause an illness? To say anger can cause heart failure is like saying that stepping on the gas pedal too hard might burst the fuel pump. It could happen, but if it does, something was drastically wrong with the fuel pump in the first place. To say thoughts, sensations, or emotions cause purely somatic disease is self-contradictory. Thoughts, sensations, and emotions can become disordered, which amounts to a disease, but such a disorder is the result of an underlying cause. The diseases and the disease symptoms the mind can directly cause appear to be limited to the subjective and voluntary. My seventh-grade science teacher regaled his students with the story of a fraternity hazing during which an ice cube was substituted for a red-hot branding iron at the last second. This tale was supposed to be an edifying example of the almost mystical power of the mind over the body or some such nonsense. Can an ice cube raise a burn welt if the victim is totally convinced he is being burned? I know of no documented scientific evidence that such a thing can happen. Most people, however, live in a world in which believing something makes it so -- or so they believe. Stress is the measure of a tensor that changes the length of an object (like a beam or strut), and strain is the resulting deformation of that object. Stress in the health-context, therefore, is a metaphorical allusion to strain: Dr. Selye meant to refer to a reaction to outside forces acting on the body, rather than to the outside forces themselves. Selye chose a word associated with concrete, quantifiable physical forces, and thus appropriated the cachet of objectivity and legitimacy from the hard sciences. This error reminds me of Velifkofsky's Worlds in Collision, in which the words "hydrocarbons" and "carbohydrates" are used interchangeably. Not surprisingly, the word stress is used nowadays interchangeably to refer to events acting on the body as well as to the reaction of the body to outside events. Selye discovered stress when he found abnormal internal organs in dissected rats. He had often chased the rats around the lab while trying to catch them and return them to their cages whence they often escaped. Selye surmised it was all this chasing about that caused the damage to the internal organs of the rats. The process of chasing and capture caused the rats to have a stress reaction, which in turn caused the damage to the internal organs of the rats. Selye's first explanation was that you only have so much adrenaline -- now called epinephrine -- and when you run out, you run out. Selye's treatise contains pictures of blackened, shriveled rat adrenal glands. Selye then came up with all sorts of ways to torture rats. He called it inducing stressin the rats or stressing the rats. Sometimes Selye electrified the cage floor to shock the rat's feet at unpredictable intervals, causing the rats to leap into the air. Other times he shoved rats tightly into a tube so they could not move. Sometimes he forced rats to swim for long periods of time. He also blared nonstop noise at rats, trusting that rats find constant blaring noise stressful. He would give some rats a warning: a bell would ring immediately before the random electric shock. Selye reasoned, would be less stressful to the rats, as the warning would allow the rats to relax their guard most of the time. Selye found that no matter how you torture rats, when you kill them and cut them open afterwards you always find the same damage to the same internal organs. Selye as a major and definitive feature in stressed rats. In addition, we now know stomach ulcer in humans is caused either by non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as aspirin or by infection with the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, and stress has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Selye's point is: it is not the constant swimming or the noise or the electric shocks or the immobility that gets you; In other words, it is not the thing trying to kill you that kills you;
Selye, no matter what torture a rat undergoes, it will always respond ("cope") in the same general way. For example, he mounted an electric probe in a rat cage. When the rat touched the probe the rat received a powerful electric shock. A rat can only do so many things -- a rat cannot file suit, pen an angry letter to the Times, or petition the government for a redress of grievances. Selye has outsmarted the rat by removing all the wood shavings from the cage, so there is nothing to dig but hard metal cage floor. The rat has run out of options, so what does the rat do? Selye demonstrated other than that if you deny an animal all other options, it just sits there? Given the circumstances, just sitting there without moving seems like the best possible course of action: after all, maybe if the rat stays perfectly still the electric probe might eventually go away and leave the rat alone. Selye interprets the results as follows: animals have a "fight or flight" response they use when threatened. If neither fight nor flight are possible, the "fight or flight" response is useless and sort of goes into idle. Yet, contrary to the famous fight or flight dichotomy, animals have another choice in addition to fight or flight: hiding. Many animals respond to danger by hiding, and hiding usually involves keeping still. The reaction Selye describes was not caused by "stress" but by an electric probe. Why interpose an abstract concept between cause and effect? Why not have the cause (electric probe) directly lead to the effect (staying still)? Selye a...
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