Medicine: The Stress-Blind

Looking for the causes of “coronaries,” medical men point accusing fingers at heredity, high-fat diets, emotional strain. Last week the American Psychosomatic Society met in Manhattan, heard a panel of experts examine the kinds of personalities most prone to heart attacks, re-emphasize the dangers of stress. Even the “lethalness of a high-fat diet in our society,” noted Dr. Henry I. Russek, consultant in cardiovascular research for the U.S. Public Health Service, “seems to be dependent on the ‘catalytic influence’ of stressful living.”

The “stress-blind” personality cannot recognize his own stress limits. He is usually compulsive about time, overworked, burning to be recognized, restless during his leisure hours, and guilty about not working during them. A perfectionist, he is impatient with subordinates, overmeticulous, prefers doing work to delegating it. His job alone does not produce the stress; more frequently, stress comes from multiple goals and his attitude toward them. To compensate for his anxiety, the stress-blind personality over-eats, smokes and drinks too much, commits himself so heavily that he has no time for exercise.

What happens then? The ordinary cocktail-hour psychiatrist will have no difficulty understanding the professionals’ explanation. The stress-blind personality creates for himself a “maladaptation syndrome,” theorizes the University of Oklahoma’s Dr. Stewart Wolf, in which increased blood cholesterol is a “biological adaptive mechanism for providing the body with fuel for extraordinary effort. Because the stress-prone individual is constantly striving and constantly frustrated, his body reacts as though he were constantly carrying a burden.” The rise in blood cholesterol and lipides (fatty molecules) may increase the danger of thrombosis, particularly when other factors (heredity, diet) are already present.