Book review: The Stress of Life, by Hans Seyle

The Stress of Life (affiliate links: UK, US) is the definitive work on stress.  It is written by the man who first started research into stress and its effects on the body, Hans Selye.

Selye was responsible for first coining the term “stress” and was responsible for its introduction as a neologism into various languages, as his work was translated worldwide.  He was also the first person to use the term “stressor” to refer to a thing that causes the stress response in animals, thereby introducing a neologism into English as well.

Needless to say, The Stress of Life is pretty much the cat’s pyjamas when it comes to understanding what stress actually is and how it affects us.  It’s a great book, full of fascinating content and Selye turns a wry phrase when he puts his mind to it.

The Stress of Life: the definitive bible on stress

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Why read about stress, anyway?

Why on earth am I writing about stress?  What does stress have to do with strength training, fitness or health?

Well, I have just finished a long series about nutrition, which discussed the effect of nutrition on health and performance.  While writing that series, I came to realise that, in various respects, nutrition has much less of an impact on health and performance than I had previously had thought (and certainly a lot less than many people would have you believe).

Reading the work of Malcolm Kendrick, I realised that your diet has very little impact on your risk of heart disease, which I understand is still the world’s number one cause of death.

Dr Kendrick maintains that stress is the main cause of heart disease.  And while you may have Robb Wolf down as a nutrition guru, he does spend a lot of time explaining how stress can cause big health problems.

So at the moment, I think that the health and fitness community should be spending a lot more time talking about stress and a lot less time talking about their macronutrient ratios.

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The Stress of Life: in five parts

The Stress of Life divides into five main parts:

1. The Discovery of Stress
2. The Dissection of Stress
3. The Diseases of Adaptation
4. Sketch for a Unified Theory
5. Implications and Applications

Selye recommends that if you are a non-scientist, you actually start reading the book at chapter five, so you can see why the study of stress is important before you start reading about how it was discovered.

I  studied stress briefly during a year reading psychology at university so I piled straight in at the beginning and I am glad that I did.  Selye’s account of how he came to discover stress back in 1936 is an incredibly human story and not at all difficult to follow.

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The Discovery of Stress

Selye describes how he now recognises that the first seeds of his discovery of stress were sown long before he actually began researching it.

He recalls that, in his early years as a medical student, he was introduced to various patients who had differing ailments.  His professors showed that all of them had the same non-specific symptoms, such as fever, enlarged spleen or liver, enlarged tonsils and skin rashes, but that these were not helpful in diagnosing the nature of the disease.  He was told to look for various tiny hints that were almost invisible to his untrained eye, that would help identify the exact nature of the illness.

To Selye’s youthful and untrained mind, this jarred.  How could completely different diseases produce such similar responses?  (This is a very similar thought process to the one that Henry Bieler went through).  However, for a long time, Selye forgot about this idea and concentrated on passing his exams.

When he first took up a research post, Selye began work looking at the physiological changes that occur in response to hormones.  He was working in a laboratory injecting rats with various extracts taken from endocrine glands.  However, he was confused that the extracts of the various glands all produced the same biological response in the rats.

This response was threefold:

1. Enlargement of the adrenal cortex
2. Atrophy of the thymus, spleen and lymph nodes
3. Ulcers in the stomach and duodenum

Selye was sceptical that his results were being caused by hormonal changes so he injected the rats with a mild non-biological toxin, a poison.  He was initially surprised when they displayed the same response.  However, he quickly realised that the response he was observing was the body’s response to any stressor.

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The Dissection of Stress

After introducing how the concept of stress came to be discovered, Selye launches into a much more detailed section about the research that has been done into how stress works.

The early stress researchers began with a theory, which quickly became known as the General Adaptation Syndrome. This syndrome was found to have three main physiological features, which were the same features that Selye discovered in his rats:

1. Enlargement of the adrenal cortex
2. Atrophy of the thymus, spleen and lymph nodes
3. Ulcers in the stomach and duodenum

And this syndrome was also found to have three phases:

1. Alarm
2. Adaptation
3. Exhaustion

Selye found that subjects exposed to continuous stress in his experiments first experienced an alarm phase, in which they lost weight and suffered greatly.  Then, they entered an adaptation phase, in which they were able to function more normally, and even appeared to have adjusted to the stress.  However, after a length of time (5 weeks for rats exposed to cold temperatures), they entered an exhaustion phase, which seemed to be more like the initial alarm phase.

Interestingly, experiments showed that rats exposed to cold temperatures and into an adaptation phase died quicker than rats that had been living at room temperature when both groups of rats were exposed to even colder temperatures.

This is fascinating, as you would expect that the cold-conditioned rats would find it easier to survive in the colder temperatures.

This discovery led Selye to the idea that there was an adaptation energy that was being used up and that the adaptation phase was using that energy.  What the energy is and how it is stored was unknown at the time of writing.

Selye also covers the various hormone interactions as part of this chapter but in the interests of brevity, I am going to leave the discussion of those for another time.

However, to understand the next section, it is important to understand that stress results in various hormone releases, including groups of hormones called pro-inflammatory hormones and anti-inflammatory hormones.  The imbalance of these can cause what Selye refers to as “the diseases of adaptation”.

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The Diseases of Adaptation

In this important section, Selye explains that when our hormonal response to stressors is out of kilter, we can suffer diseases of adaptation.  These are physiological symptoms that occur when our own defence mechanisms cause problems for us.

There is so much in this section of relevance that it is impossible to summarise, let alone do justice to.  However, let me pick out a couple of interesting bits:

Individual differences

Selye notes that each of us respond differently, depending on which part of our system is the weakest.  You may recall that the idea of individual differences to stressors (which include pathogens and disease) is not particularly popular in mainstream medicine or medical media but is one championed by the alternative approach of the metabolic pioneers and William Wolcott in particular.

Heart disease

Just like Malcolm Kendrick, Selye believes that heart disease can be caused by stress.  Indeed, he showed by experimentation that severe stress in rats and rabbits could cause marked hormonal changes that resulted in heart failure.

Hypertension

Selye found that the removal of adrenals basically reversed hypertension in pretty much every species they could lay hands on.  Obviously, the subjects needed hormonal supplements thereafter but ultimately, the cause of hypertension was hormonal, not nutritional.

Ulcers

You might have skated over the fact that Selye discovered stress in 1936 and that he was already a medical researcher at that time.  So he lived through the Second World War.  He noted that in the UK there was an unusual incidence of people admitted to hospital the night after an air-raid, who yet had no other injuries.  It turned out that they had severe ulcers caused purely by stress.  Since Selye could induce ulcers in rats in less than 48 hours, he knew that this was the explanation.  Others found it more difficult to believe.

Diabetes

Selye notes that various stress hormones cause a rise in blood sugar, which can cause otherwise healthy people to develop metabolic syndrome and diabetes.  Bear in mind that this book was first published in 1956 and we are still having difficulty getting people to accept this point…

Infectious diseases

While I note that Selye quotes Louis Pasteur respectfully, he does make the point that there are infectious diseases that we catch irrespective of our state and there are infectious diseases that we only catch if we are in a debilitated state.

Selye himself performed experiments that showed that rats, which are normally resistant to human strains of tuberculosis, caught that strain if they had previously been subjected to a stressor.

This idea is strikingly similar to the underlying beliefs of the Henry Bieler, William Wolcott, William Donald Kelley and the other pioneers of metabolic medicine.

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Sketch for a unified theory

Selye has a wonderful writing style and an incredibly gifted imagination.  He explains concepts very clearly and sees how mainstream logic is flawed with a clarity that I envy.

In this section, he presents some assumptions that his own discoveries have unpicked:

Health is the absence of disease – no it is not.  Health can be massively impacted by the presence of stress and the presence of disease can be mitigated hugely by the proper balance of stress hormones in the body.

Disease causes symptoms – not necessarily.  Most symptoms of an afflicted person are the result of the stress hormones acting on the body.  Sometimes they are acting optimally and sometimes not.

I’m not going to get into the detail here because I’ve already massively overrun my word-count and I have another section to go before I can finish.

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Implications and Applications

In this final section, Selye first covers some research into the stressors felt by a number of key occupations and their incidence of heart disease.  I’m not going to cover those here as I’ll refer to them more over the next couple of weeks.

However, he also makes a call for medicine to proceed on the basis of these fundamental principles, that he feels are supported by his research:

 

1. That our body responds to diseases and pathogens using the same fundamental mechanism
2. That we can analyse and break down this mechanism into its varying hormonal effects and endocrine glands
3. That our first response should be to find ways to help the body achieve balance in its response to the disease or pathogen, not to find ways to attack the disease.  (For me, Selye is channelling Henry Bieler at this point).

I have to say, I find it sad that someone like Selye can devote his whole life to scrutinising stress and its effects on our health and despite his hard work we are still pursuing the “disease-leads to-symptoms-requires-pharmaceutical cure” road which, amongst other factors, has led to profound stagnation in our modern healthcare provision (Seth Roberts).

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Conclusion

Stress is massively important for your health.  It is definitely the most important thing that you are currently ignoring and it’s the elephant in the room when it comes to modern medicine and medical research.  If you want to live a long and enjoyable life it is probably more important than nutrition and exercise combined.

The Stress of Life is the fundamental work on stress by the man who invented the subject, coined the term “stressor” back in the 1930′s and wrote over 30 books and thousands of articles about it.  His work is still completely fresh today because very few people in the mainstream medical profession are paying any attention to it.