5 Categories Of Stress & How They Frame The Immune Response
Surprisingly, stepping up to the mic or tackling mental math triggers an immune response akin to the initial phase of an infection.
Hans Seyle, an endocrinologist known as ‘the father of stress research,’ founded the concept of stress in the medical lexicon in the 1930s. After years of research, he was also the first to link stress and the immune system.
His representation of how the body responds to stress, however, was somewhat terrifying — shrinkage of the lymphoid tissues and liver, fluid build-up in the chest and abdomens, muscle and fat loss, stomach ulcers, red or bulging eyes, and increased salivation.
But unlike the everyday stressors that we face today, Seyle’s kind of stressors were entirely biological, encompassing factors like ‘exposure to cold, surgical injury, production of spinal shock (transcision of the cord), excessive muscular exercise, or intoxications with sublethal doses of diverse drugs.’
The body’s responses to stress, according to Seyle, ‘represent a generalized effort of the organism to adapt itself to new conditions.’ And the process of these responses, Seyle suggested, ‘might be compared to other general defense reactions such as inflammation or the…
