Research: How to Handle Stress: Learn to Enjoy It

The mid-20th century, with its jet-speed travel, its population explosion and its threat of nuclear annihilation, has been widely touted as “the age of stress.” Last weekend a dozen of the world’s top authorities on all kinds of stress got together in a symposium at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. Their conclusion: today’s stresses differ from yesterday’s more in kind than in degree. More important, they said, stress is good for you. In fact, it would be hard to live without it.

“Poor Sanctuary.” Most of the conferees could not even define stress. But Physiologist Stanley J. Sarnoff of the National Institutes of Health supplied a paradoxical definition: “Stress is the process of living. The process of living is the process of reacting to stress.” Key points by other speakers in sup port of this view: ∙ PHYSICAL STRESS, no matter how se vere, cannot harm the heart unless it is already seriously diseased or has an in adequate blood supply, said Cardiologist Paul Dudley White. The same goes for arteries, veins and capillaries. Further more, the heart and blood vessels do not merely tolerate an abundance of regular physical exercise; they thrive on it. Many cardiologists, said Dr.

White, still doubt that emotional stress by itself can actually cause heart dis ease, either directly, or indirectly through the nervous system. But he granted that if the heart is already damaged, emotional upsets may put an unbearable strain upon it. There is no question that emotional stress aggra vates high blood pressure and arterial damage, and may, as a result, become an indirect cause of death.

∙PSYCHIC STRESS is probably no more severe now than in the days of the stagecoach and the highwayman, said the University of Michigan’s Neurophysiologist Ralph W. Gerard. “It is not long ago that a man, leaving the small safety of his home in the morn ing, ran considerable risk of being robbed or assassinated by ruffians, or jailed or executed by his rulers, before he could return to it. And the home it self was a poor sanctuary from starva tion and disease, from pain and pri vation and death.” Things are better now, even for the underprivileged, in much of the world. But it is a case of new stresses being substituted for old. Because there has been “an explosion of expectations,” there will be “again a stressful period of adjusting to the abundance of goods.”

∙ MENTAL STRESS is good for the mind, Dr. Gerard added: “Activity of the nervous system improves its capacity for activity, just as exercising a muscle makes it stronger.” Is It an Antidote? Some kinds of stress may even be antidotes for the harmful effects of other kinds, and the symposium considered an example in the flesh. Montreal’s Dr. Hans Selye, who has made a career of studying stress, appeared on crutches and explained that he had broken his hip by falling out of a maple tree “while following the advice of Dr. White to get more exercise.” Dr. White shot back: “Perhaps the fracture that I sustained in a softball game 25 years ago has protected my heart up to now, and I would like to ask Dr. Selye whether he thinks his fracture has protected him from a heart attack.” Dr. Selye could not tell: all he knew was that he has never had a heart attack.

Though a little stress is good, it is obviously not true that more is better. Intolerable stress leading to suicide will kill more than 19,000 in the U.S. this year, said Harvard Psychiatrist Jack R. Ewalt. And probably as many more will die in undetected or unreported suicides. Whether such intolerable stress damages the heart and arteries, as well as the mind, is now being investigated in New York City, said Dr. White. Medical examiners are comparing the amount of atherosclerosis they find in men who have committed suicide with that in men killed in accidents.

It all added up to Dr. Selye’s apothegm: “One cannot be cured of stress, but can only learn to enjoy it.”