Exactly What Is The Role Of Stress?

By Author: Steven Johnson
Total Articles: 494
Comment this article

In these modern times, we seem obsessed with the idea of stress. Everywhere you look, you see ads and stories designed to highlight the fact we have too much stress. Our lives, our jobs, our relationships. . . everything can be lost if we don't chill out. Usually this involves spending large amounts of money. We send our wives and partners to spas where they are pampered and emerge looking like tanned goddesses (at least when they are young or our eyesight has started to fail). There are a vast range of different products to rub on, swallow or inject into ourselves to help us ride through the troubles of our lives. So aroma, taste and, if necessary, Botox to ease the wrinkles out of sight and so relieve us of more of our anxieties. Exercise gurus teach us to relax by selling us CDs and downloads for our iPods. A better future awaits us if only we can learn how to live calmly.

Yet, stress was an essential defense mechanism. If you were wandering through the jungle or across a plain where there might be predators around, you were always alert. At the first sign of danger, the adrenaline levels increased rapidly, triggering ...
... the fight or flight reflex. Just because there may not be real tigers lurking behind a bush waiting to snack on us for lunch does not mean we can afford to let down our guard. There are still social dangers around us and, if we are not alert, we will lose out on opportunities. So don't be taken in by all this hype about the need to relax. This is only good for the mass of people if having a submissive population is what we want. But if we want to maintain our competitive edge as a society and a nation, we need stress to drive us to better levels of performance.

That said, it's actually tiring to be strung out all the time. It's good to be able to relax when not in "danger". It's all a question of finding the right balance in our life. Which does bring us to an important message. Certain kinds of stress do cause hair loss. For example, men who have traumatic injury or go through the physical shock of chemo- or radio-therapy can find their hair drops out. Under normal circumstances, the hair regrows when we recover but it does indicate the need to be able to come to terms with injury and illness. But the more general stress in everyday living has no effect on our hair. Losing our hair is purely due to a change in our hormone levels as we age. No matter what the marketers may try to tell us, going to a spa and having a beautiful girl rub something sweet-smelling on to our scalp is not going to encourage our hair to grow. It may encourage other parts to grow in size for a while, but that's not always the effect we were looking for. So for general purposes, rely on Propecia. So long as we start as soon as a doctor confirms the diagnosis of male pattern baldness, the hair loss will stop and, in some cases, our hair will regrow. Now that really will help us relax.