WHO SAYS STRESS IS BAD FOR YOU?
If you aren't already paralyzed with stress from
reading the financial news, here's a sure way to achieve that grim state: read
a medical-journal article that examines what stress can do to your brain.
Stress, you'll learn, is crippling your neurons so that, a few years or decades
from now, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease will have an easy time destroying
what's left. That's assuming you haven't already died by then of some other
stress-related ailment such as heart disease. As we enter what is sure to be a
long period of uncertainty—a gantlet of lost jobs, dwindling assets, home
foreclosures and two continuing wars—the downside of stress is certainly worth
exploring. But what about the upside? It's not something we hear much about.
In the past several years, a lot of us have
convinced ourselves that stress is unequivocally negative for everyone, all the
time. We've blamed stress for a wide variety of problems, from slight memory
lapses to full-on dementia—and that's just in the brain. We've even come up
with a derisive nickname for people who voluntarily plunge into stressful
situations: they're "adrenaline junkies."
Sure, stress can be bad for you, especially if you
react to it with anger or depression or by downing five glasses of Scotch. But
what's often overlooked is a common-sense counterpoint: in some circumstances,
it can be good for you, too. It's right there in basic-psychology textbooks. As
Spencer Rathus puts it in "Psychology: Concepts and Connections,"
"some stress is healthy and necessary to keep us alert and occupied."
Yet that's not the theme that's been coming out of science for the past few
years. "The public has gotten such a uniform message that stress is always
harmful," says Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins
University. "And that's too bad, because most people do their best under
mild to moderate stress."
The stress response—the body's hormonal reaction to
danger, uncertainty or change—evolved to help us survive, and if we learn how
to keep it from overrunning our lives, it still can. In the short term, it can
energize us, "revving up our systems to handle what we have to
handle," says Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist at UCLA. In the long term,
stress can motivate us to do better at jobs we care about. A little of it can
prepare us for a lot later on, making us more resilient. Even when it's
extreme, stress may have some positive effects—which is why, in addition to
posttraumatic stress disorder, some psychologists are starting to define a
phenomenon called posttraumatic growth. "There's really a biochemical and
scientific bias that stress is bad, but anecdotally and clinically, it's quite
evident that it can work for some people," says Orloff. "We need a
new wave of research with a more balanced approach to how stress can serve
us." Otherwise, we're all going to spend far more time than we should
stressing ourselves out about the fact that we're stressed out.
When I started asking researchers about "good
stress," many of them said it essentially didn't exist. "We never
tell people stress is good for them," one said. Another allowed that it
might be, but only in small ways, in the short term, in rats. What about people
who thrive on stress, I asked—people who become policemen or ER docs or
air-traffic controllers because they like seeking out chaos and putting things
back in order? Aren't they using stress to their advantage? No, the researchers
said, those people are unhealthy. "This business of people saying they
'thrive on stress'? It's nuts," Bruce Rabin, a distinguished psychoneuroimmunologist,
pathologist and psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh School of
Medicine, told me. Some adults who seek out stress and believe they flourish
under it may have been abused as children or permanently affected in the womb
after exposure to high levels of adrenaline and cortisol, he said. Even if they
weren't, he added, they're "trying to satisfy" some psychological
need. Was he calling this a pathological state, I asked—saying that people who
feel they perform best under pressure actually have a disease? He thought for a
minute, and then: "You can absolutely say that. Yes, you can say
that."
This kind of statement might well have the father of stress research
lying awake worried in his grave. Hans Selye, who laid the foundations of stress
science in the 1930s, believed so strongly in good stress that he coined a
word, "eustress," for it. He saw stress as "the salt of
life." Change was inevitable, and worrying about it was the flip side of
thinking creatively and carefully about it, something that only a brain with a
lot of prefrontal cortex can do well. Stress, then, was what made us human—a
conclusion that Selye managed to reach by examining rats.
Vocabulary:
Paralyzed = Lumpuh Worrying = Khawatir
Anger = Marah / Kemarahan. Disease = Penyakit.
Convince = Meyakinkan. Researcher = Penyelidik /
Petugas riset
Circumstances = Keadaan Under pressure = Dibawah
tekanan.
Survive = Bertahan Medicine = Obat.
Answer the following question with the correct answer:
1. Why stress sometimes good for us?
2. According to this passage, who state that some
stress is good?
3. “it” in paragraph 3 line 13 refers to . . . ?
4. What is the synonym of “worried”?
5. Do you agree or disagree with the statement in
this passage? And why?
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