Stress and the Spirit

I love my pathophysiology class. I probably learn more in it then all my other classes combined. Today, we briefly touched on the issue of stress-related disorders (think depression, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, anxiety disorders, etc.). My professor, Dr. Sam, basically told us that these conditions did not exist 30 years ago. Why all of a sudden do we all have these chemical imbalances that effect our health? The simple answer is stress. Or is it?

Are these disorders caused by chemical imbalances? Well...sort of. We all have stressors in our lives, both good and bad. And we all have methods to cope with those stressors. We cannot control our likes and dislikes to certain things and our internal reactions to them. What we do control is the behavior we display. That is what makes us uniquely human. We are not forced to react on those most base feelings. We have a higher level of reasoning and thought process that allows us to interpret our life events. And this is where we run into trouble. It is not the stress that causes chemical imbalances it is our perception of the stress.

We all know that everyone responds differently to stressors. For some, a test might be a huge cause of stress and pressure while others actually enjoy studying. Why? It's all in the perception. It's not the test itself giving you stress, it's how you feel about the test. Some typical stressors actually can lead some people to thrive. An easy way to tell that someone is not effectively coping with stress? Asking questions with no answers. "Why did this happen to me?" "Why does nothing in my life ever go right?" "What did my friend/child/parent do to deserve this?" When our mind can't come up with these answers, it causes stress. We need to be able to answer these questions and satisfy our brain in order to reduce our stress level. When we can't answer these questions, our brains freak out and we end with the chemical imbalances that "cause" disorders. In short, we need answers.

What in our culture really offers answers to these questions? We live in a me-first world that says there is nothing more to life then being alive, having fun, and making ourselves happy. How do we cope when we can no longer do those things? This might seem like a contrite answer, but it's not meant to be. We've lost our spirituality, or sense of a deeper meaning and purpose. We don't have answers to these questions anymore. When I think about some of the most spiritual people I know, they don't struggle with these questions. Not that they necessarily have it all figured out and have answers to everything but they've come to a place where they are OK, they can cope with these questions. Faith offers us the most important coping mechanism of all: the ability to see things outside of ourselves and the first glimmer of insight into questions that are way to big for us to handle. If you look at it that way, I think maybe reading C.S. Lewis is the single best coping mechanism a person could ask for. The moral of the story? Get out there and get some stress relief- gospel style!