1/25/16 Stress Is Good If You Mean To Succeed?

    I got carried away showing how in  my personal life stress has been a part of who I have become.  I never thought of it as a bad thing, just something that you either step up and challenge the stress, or go find mommy's hug and hide from the bad feelings of losing.  Either way, my thoughts were prompted by reading a chapter on stress in The Lucifer Principle.
    The chapter starts out with a very reasonable quote from the bible "There is nothing better for men than they should be happy in their work, for that is what they are here for."
    There is then a long explanation how we confused stress caused by succeeding at work, versus stress from a social loss.  It is easy to understand the decline in a man who has lost a spouse to death or divorce, or even to lose the vocation that gave their life meaning.  The author sees those problems coming from as he sees it:
- each of us is sewn by invisible threads into the super organism.  We are cells in the beast of family, company, and country.  If those social ties are severed we begin to shrivel and die.
- Hard work and the pursuit of challenge have seldom demonstrated to hurt us, but we can be damaged powerfully by the lack of control.  Without striving to achieve, we cannot control our lives,
- Then there is position in the pecking order making an additional contribution to many of the symptoms blamed on stress.  With our dream of eliminating competition, we try to wish away the pecking order.  But we will continue to live in pecking order structures whether we like it or not.  The brutal fact is that the more we opt out of competition, the lower our position is likely to be.  Can that be summed up better than "if you snooze, you lose!"
    Bloom (the author), continues "consequences supposedly beaten into our lives by stress are the product of pecking order slippage, otherwise known as defeat."  Studies show that one of the greatest causes of high blood pressure in humans, is low position in a social order.  Raise a human's status and you reduce his hypertension.  Similar results were seen in baboon colonies, where the lead baboons were much healthier and the lower ranking baboons were seen with higher levels of stress hormones.
    Excessive relaxation is a slow form of suicide.  If you fail to use your organs, your body begins to dispose of them.  The phenomenom shows up clearly among women who don't exercise, their skeletal systems start shrinking and stop collecting calcium.  Same things happen to muscles that are not used regularly, they atrophy and shrink.
    The consequences are worst for infants, when they do not receive sufficient sensory stimulation, their neural circuitry fails to develop.  It has been shown though, both in infants and adults that the density of connections in their cerebral tissue can be increased, by mastering new experiences.  To both body and brain, taking it easy is death, vigorous activity, on the other hand, is life itself.
    The rest of the chapter he expands on this thought, on how stress on an individual is good, but the same holds for a nation.  We should not be relaxing, letting the Japanese outperform us, we will soon find ourselves in a pecking order where we are no longer number 1, but further down, and that will not sit well with us.