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the war on stress

How about you? Can you tally 300 points or more, based on
life events of the past twelve months? If you can, can it really make
you sick?

The Parable of the Mice in the Refrigerator

Hans Selye is the founder of modern stress research. In one of his
most famous experiments, he introduced mice to a stressful envi-
ronment (in this case, the cold of a refrigerator) to see how they
would react. Invariably, they went through three distinct stages.
First, they fell into a funk, hunkering down to gut out a particularly
long winter. (I went through a similar reaction during my first win-
ter in Wisconsin.) But when the winter persisted, the mice went into
a productive and cooperative frenzy, making nests and otherwise
adapting their environment to make it more hospitable. (That’s me,
too, learning to put up storm windows and dressing in layers.)

Stage three really got Selye’s attention and deserves ours.
Almost without exception, the mice dropped dead. The cold
wasn’t lethal, but something about living under extreme stress for
prolonged periods of time apparently was.

Subsequent researchers like Christopher Coe have made the
connection. Coe separates baby monkeys from their mothers and
measures the effect of this trauma on their white blood cell count.
Take the monkeys from their mamas, and the white blood cell
count plummets, thus depressing the immune system and leaving
the monkeys vulnerable to all sorts of diseases. Reunite them, and
their blood count rises.

The Fun Stuff Is Also Stressful

Another look at the Holmes-Rahe stress scale begins to bring the prob-
lem of stress into even sharper focus. Other items on the scale include:

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