120: Stress is Just Adaptation: The Impact of the Human Stress Response with Mary Wingo
Dr. Mary Wingo is here to talk about stress and her new book, The Impact of the Human Stress Response: The Biological Origins and Solutions to Human Stress. She answers the tough questions, and explains how to understand stress (adaptation to people or an environment).\xa0Dr. Mary discusses the major causes of stress, as well as how we can all live happier and more fulfilled lives with purpose.\n\nDisplay TranscriptRobert Plank: Today's guest is Dr. Mary Wingo. She's the author of the impact of the human stress response and in her book she talks about the root causes of stress and how to manage it effectively, why the stress response is essential for helping to adapt to one's environment, the fascinating biology of human stress, the 5 major causes of stress in modernized society, and how to protect your health. Learn how to avoid overloading one body's stress response.\n\nLots of cool stuff. Welcome to the show Mary.\n\nMary Wingo: Thank you. Thank you for having me Robert.\n\nRobert Plank: I understand that you talk about stress and stuff like that.\n\nMary Wingo: Yes. Absolutely. That is what I'm about.\n\nRobert Plank: Cool. I work from home. I don't know about you but I get stressed about stuff all the time and I think it might feel like as I'm getting older either the stress is more, or maybe I'm just more aware of it. What's the answer? Is stress of thing that we need to manage, or minimize, or ignore, or can we direct it into something good? What's the answer to this whole stress problem?\n\nMary Wingo: First off is understanding the actual definition of stress Robert. The definition of stress, and it took a very long time to actually come up with a workable definition, but the definition is this. It's the rate of adjustment that you undergo in order to adapt to whatever an environment that you happen to find yourself in. The key is here, is that there's 2 aspects. There's 2 sides of stress. There's the actual, since we're talking about people, the human being, and the second component is the environment. It can actually be a matter of personal will or it can actually be something that's out of your reach, and that's a problem with the environment, and you just have to alter or change your environment.\n\nRobert Plank: Okay. For example, if someone transitions from a day job to being a full-time entrepreneur, or they had a big life change or something like that. That is, I guess what stress is, so if someone goes through that stress and overcomes it versus the stress kind of hangs around or gets worse, what's happening there versus someone who's actually dealing with it?\n\nMary Wingo: Okay. You've touched on a really important point. Yes. Ultimately organisms, you are only supposed to be subjected to stress periodically, sporadically, but the way that modernized society is structured, a lot of us have, not necessarily horrible life-threatening stressors, it's not like a bear is chasing us every second of the day, but for most of us these nagging somewhat smaller stress, well there are some large stresses too, but that just go on day after day after day, and it's relentless.\n\nStress mechanisms are just that. They are how we adapt. They are our adaptive mechanisms. It's not just the adrenaline. It's not just cortisol. It is a whole cascade of physical responses. The key is to be able to do what you can call to try to resolve the stress and not keep a nagging, incessant exposure day after day after day to it because when that happens that is when we get stress related mental illness and physical disease. In fact it's an exploding phenomenon in our society.\n\nRobert Plank: Could you walk us through an example or a case study of someone who you dealt with who had just a really bad problem with stress and you changed their ways and it fixed it up a little bit?\n\nMary Wingo: Oh, I can use myself.\n\nRobert Plank: Perfect.\n\nMary Wingo: I'll use myself because ultimately, when I was researching, this was decades in the making.