STRESS By: Carl Adams For Cathy Nichols
There are two basic classes of stress-Helpful and Harmful. There are also two types of stress-Physical and Mental. They almost always overlap between class and type.
We are continuously subjected to stress throughout our lives and even beyond.
Normally , at birth, the heart of an infant is beating. Each contraction of the heart muscle is a helpful stress. The doctor then picks the infant up by the feet and spanks it a sharp blow. This creates an overlapping stress. It is helpful in that it clears the lungs and trachea of mucus to allow breathing, -helpful}, and at the same time, subjecting the infant to it's first fit of anger, not so helpful}, followed by frustration. After all, the infant is in an awkward position. The doctor is holding it's feet so the infant cannot kick him. The infants arms are so short it cannot reach the doctor to hit him back and , even if it could catch the doctor off guard, the infant has no teeth to bite with. Besides, what had it ever done to the doctor, other than create a lot of revenue for him?
Physical and mental exercise, in reasonable amounts, has been found to be one of the best means of combating stress. Dr. Paul Dudley White stated that a five mile walk would do more good for an unhappy, but otherwise healthy person, than all the medication and psychology in the world. He was a noted heart specialist and personal physician to a number of U.S. presidents.
Dr. Hubert de Vries, of the U.C.L.A. compared the effects of exercise with a number of tranquilizing drugs and found the exercise to far exceed the drugs in combating mental stress.
For the sake of demonstration, let's assume that the infant mentioned earlier is an average female, born to middle income parents and has a normal childhood, if there is such a thing. After the sharp blow from the doctor, probably, the next sensation the young lady will have is that there has been an uncomfortable drop in temperature. Then she looks around to see what is wrong and decides the whole world is upside down. Keep in mind that just moments before was the first time she had met this bunch of people and doesn't know what language, if any, they speak and immediately devises a system to be used for the rest of her life when she is in an uncomfortable position. There is a short scream and she says to herself "I am going to have to learn to do better than that- a lot better". She begins to practice and sure enough the screams increase in both volume and duration. Soon she is wrapped in a small blanket and says to herself "Ah ha, it works. Now I am going to get the fuzzy corner of this blanket off of my nose by the same method".
As the child develops she learns another trick to get what she wants. She finds that if she looks cute and smiles she can get whatever she wants. This usually occurs between ten and fifteen days after birth and continues off and on throughout life.
By five or six months of age the child begun to crawl and by ten to twelve months has decided she can get into a lot more if she learns to walk. Anyone who has never watched a child learn to walk has missed an excellent lesson in determination. While she is learning to walk, she is subjected to both mental and physical stress, as well as contusions, lacerations, abrasions, strained muscles and joints and occasionally broken bones or loosened teeth.
This doesn't seem to be stressful to the child but the mother sometimes has to be hospitalized for it. The stage of a child learning to walk is very beneficial to the parents because it helps them learn to cope with stress in the future, such as when the child has learned to walk and is continuously pulling the doilies off of the end tables and dumping everything on her little head, or imitating her mother by turning all the burners and the oven on. Some seem to have a fascination with playing in the water in the commode while others seem more inclined to choke the family cat to watch it's tongue stick out. Not all family cats seem to enjoy this as much as the child, so , more lacerations and stress not only for the child but the mother and cat as well.
There are a number of causes of harmful physical stress. Some of which are overexertion, injury, birth defects, disease and to some extent, what is referred to as growing pains. A number of our normal body functions also create if not harmful at least unpleasant physical stress.
One of these is when our young lady starts to cut teeth. As in all things our Creator showed superior intelligence when he created the female homoprimate to be ladylike, then designed her to cut her teeth before she learned to speak. Had she learned to speak first, her mother would have spent a lot of time washing her mouth out with soap in the teething process.
There are also a number of causes of mental stress. The most common of which is anxiety, Followed closely by undesirable physical stress. After this it gets complicated. Apprehension, uncertain, and any combination of the above can lead to anything from mild annoyance to psoriasis, to migraine headaches, to fever and even death.
As an example, from 1978 to 1984, there was a survey kept of heart attack victims in Johns Hopkins hospital and the results was printed in the A.M.A. Journal of medicine in December, 1985. This survey indicated that a male between the ages of 45 and 60 years of age was nine times more susceptible to a heart attack if in the last twelve months he had been subjected to a severe emotional stress, such as a divorce or the death of an immediate family member. I do not remember where, but I have read that under the same conditions, a female would be only four or five times as susceptible to a heart attack.
By the time our young lady has reached the age of puberty, her parents will have learned to live with some mental stress, but she will be reaching one of the most stressful phases of her life.
There will invariably be another lady in school whom our young lady feels a little inferior around. It may be that the other one is a better athlete, has a little higher grade average, or it may be only imagined, but after our subject has schemed, begged and pleaded until she has gotten her mother to buy her a new skirt and sweater or a new dress and shoes, it can be very disappointing the first day she wears her new outfit if the other girl happens to wear identical clothing that day.
Not long after this she discovers that there are two types of students at school-Boys and Girls. As she begins to look over the prospects she discovers that there are two kinds of boys- those already claimed by another girl and those who are totally undesirable. At this time she does what any clean cut red blooded church going young lady would do. She goes after the boy claimed by the lady who wore the identical clothing.
It usually develops that he would prefer our young lady, but he also going through the same mental anguish as the girls and was afraid to ask her out because of the fear of rejection. When she finds how easy it is to attract boys, she loses interest in them and decides to let Miss Identical Clothing have him back. By this time, Miss Identical Clothing has found someone else and our young lady coasts along, relative un-stressed for a while. 'There is no record of the amount of stress the boy is going through at this time).
About graduation time, she meets Mr. Perfect, and is utterly amazed at herself for having gone to school with him all this time and did not realize he was there. Right away she is confronted with the problem of enticing Mr. Perfect into not only dating her but proposing and marrying her. By this time she has fully developed what in lay language is referred to as women's intuition and realizes that she can't go out with him the first time he asks, but must refuse in a manner that get him to ask again. Since she has already decided to pursue Mr. Perfect with more determination than she used in learning to walk, two things should be apparent. First, he doesn't have a chance and second, her mental stress reaches a level somewhere between unbelievable and unbearable.
When she and Mr. Perfect are married she realizes that she has reached the end of her troubles. If she knew which end, the world population would start to decrease pretty soon, because she and millions like her would decide to be old maids or Nuns or working girls or anything but housewives.
One of the first things she notices about being newlyweds is that there is still a lot of month left when the money runs out and another is that two people don't use a lot of dishes and don't get a lot of clothes dirty and it don't take long to clean a small house. In other words there is a lot of day left when the housework runs out.
She came up with the perfect solution to both of these problems, and applied for a job as a waitress at one of the better cafes in town. Being better than average looking, pretty smart and very energetic she was able to get a job at the first place she applied. It didn't hurt that her new father-in-law owned the place.
At first the physical stress on the job compensated for the mental stress so she was happy and well adjusted. After three or four months she began to notice that some normal, everyday occurrences were beginning to really get on her nerves. One Sunday in the after Church lunch rush one of the local farmers came in with his family to eat. He and his wife had seven children and the best thing you could say about the children was that they were not well disciplined. When they finished eating there was food all the way around the table as well as under it. All the chairs had to be cleaned because the children had poured sugar and ketchup in all of them. All of the bottles on the table had to be re-filled too. The table and surrounding area looked like a refugee from the city dump. Company policy required the waitresses to smile and wish the customer a good day. As she was in the process of doing this she overheard the farmer asking the cashier for change for a quarter so he could leave the nice waitress a tip.
As these small annoyances continued to create more and more mental stress it began to reflect in her attitude at home so her husband suggested that she quit working or go to a Doctor and get something for her nerves.
She made an appointment with the doctor for one afternoon after work, and went to see him. When she arrived the waiting room was full and she had to wait for over an hour to see the doctor. She was late getting home, and her husband was already there, sitting in the living room, hungry and glaring at her. She said "Guess what. We are going to be parents." While her husband was still in shock-another form of stress) she added-The doctor thinks it will be triplets". The cycle begins again.
