What Is Stress?

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Different people react to stress in different ways. This is one of the problems the medical profession has in dealing with any illness. Because not only do we react to stress in different ways, we react to different medications and treatments in different ways. Every member of the human race is, effectively, a "one off", i.e., a unique individual. A medicine that will have minimal effect on one person can have serious side effects for another. There are even people who are allergic to surgical gloves. There is no way, today, to unique tailor treatments for each individual, so all of us more or less get treated with what seems to work, and some of us turn up with bad reactions.

But as to stress. Long ago when I was a very, very young Second Lieutenant I was required to take a "stress test". This was a new thing the Army was working on at the time, and lucky me I got tapped to be one of the people they were doing a check on. This so-called test was little more than filling out some forms about your background and life and how your current life was operating, and then answering some questions.

I was advised that my own, personal, stress levels were extremely high, and that I would probably be hospitalized within a year if something was not done to reduce the stress I was under.

That was pretty much the end of it.

About a year later I was transferred to a new unit, and shortly thereafter promoted to First Lieutenant. And they were running the stress thing again. My new unit decided to send me (despite my complaint I had already been and was not interested in a repeat performance). So I went, and dutifully and honestly again filled out all of the forms and answered the questions.

This time the team performing this little traveling circus looked at me and wanted to, in essence, why I was not dead or at least in the hospital. All of their tests said that my stress load was extremely high, and I completely lacked any of the "stress reducers" in my life. Yet, there I was.

Truth to tell, I did go through a "crisis" within the next year. Literally woke up, came into my office, sat down, and was utterly unable to function. Did little more than star at people who came into my office to talk to me.

One of the people who came in to see me that day was the First Sergeant, and after talking to me for a while he finally stopped and just stared at me. Then he left and returned with the Company Commander. The CO looked at me for a while also, and I know he spoke with me briefly, but nothing connected. Finally he directed that I keep my door closed from now on. I was so far gone that I did not really respond to all this, but for about the next week I dutifully reported to my office, sat in my chair with the door closed until the duty day ended and the First Sergeant told me to go home. This went on for about a week. At the end of that time I came into the office, sat down, took the top document from my in box and began processing it. About an hour later the First Sergeant looked in (several documents had by that time moved from my in box to my out box), and asked how I was doing, to which I responded fine. Then the CO came by, simply looked into the office, and left my door standing open from that point.

I have probably gone through several similar burnouts in the course of my life. There is a point where the stress level almost literally shuts down most higher brain functions (food, sleep, do not crash car, etc. remain operable, but create and take initiative are disconnected). It is very probable that, given the stress levels I have carried for much of my life that real physical harm has been done.

Life, however, goes on.