Introduction Sticks and Stones The of Stress As the morning bell rings and the principal stalks the hallway you frantically rummage through your locker Binders and papers fly to the floor behind you She's lost her history report whispers one of your friends And her dog's at the vet says another She's a wreck A total basket case We tend to view stress as a bad thing and the names we use for it aren't particularly nice Frazzled Flustered Freaking out But we've all experienced that sweaty heart racing under pressure feeling It's not something we can avoid or escape The roots of stress go back millions of years to when early humans loped through the savanna fighting hyenas and fleeing lions The emergency action hormones and chemicals in our bodies evolved to help us deal with danger And if we feel stress in our school hallways far from the dangers of the savanna we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves We all juggle commitments and responsibilities We manage math tests friendship fractures and family emergencies We have days when we're calm and days when we're anxious We're still learning to adapt those early brain responses to the technology and traffic of modern life Scientists are learning too Each year they discover new information about
how our brains grow and change and how we react to the demands of the world around us This book explores the science of anxiety and the history of stress research It examines the effects of pressure on the human body and what we can do about them The book also includes some wacky historical beliefs strange experiments and stories of stressed out stress researchers In the following chapters you'll learn about the fight or flight reaction to sudden danger how people cope with chronic pressure how trauma can affect the brain the ways athletes put pressure to work and the surprising treatments scientists have found for stress in our everyday lives At the end of it all you might be less willing to call yourself a wreck and more likely to admire how well your body and brain work together When the going gets rough that's when your toughest parts get going
Chapter 1 Fight Flight or Freeze You stroll home from school kicking a pebble as you go At the corner by the coffee shop you absentmindedly step into the crosswalk and Danger Tires screech A horn blasts Before your brain has even formed the words city bus you've leaped out of the way You sprint the last few steps to the curb where you lean on your knees gasping Your whole body's shaking Your heart pounds your ears ring and all you can see is the afterimage of that big bus fender bearing down on you You've experienced something called the fight or flight response In its most basic form stress is your body's reaction to danger In a crisis you instinctively decide whether to fight or in this case run away Your reactions to an oncoming bus are exactly the same as your ancestors reactions to an encounter with a lion Our bodies have been practicing the emergency stress response for millions of years
X Ray Vision How did stress research begin With cat food In the early 1900s a Harvard Medical School professor named Walter Cannon was studying digestion He mixed cat food with a chemical dye then used X rays to trace the substance as it moved through kitty bellies Walter noticed something strange If a cat was upset or startled by a sudden noise all digestion stopped It seemed as if the cat's emotions were affecting its insides Walter shifted the entire focus of his research He began studying the way animals including humans react to sudden stimuli Over time he learned that when an animal is frightened the body stops spending energy on everyday things like digestion and shifts into an emergency response mode Walter wrote a book about the fight instinct and the flight instinct He suggested that when we're startled we instantly decide either to battle or to run Both reactions are triggered by fear and both affect many systems of the body Other researchers called Walter's discovery the fight or flight response And the science of stress was born Today scientists have added a third possible response to crisis freeze There are times when that saber toothed cat is a little too close We don't have time to run and we'll never win the fight So our brains tell us to do what a chameleon might freeze and hope to blend in with the trees
