Author Archives: markdowe1

Health, Medical, Science

Are we all really getting more stressed?

STRESS

Intro: Modern life’s pressures can feel like they are increasing, but science reveals that it’s the nature of the stress we suffer today, rather than the amount, that has changed

BEFORE the 1940s, the only people who talked about “stress” were engineers describing whether the struts of a bridge would hold up. Today, “stress” is a vague catchall term for all of the many challenges you might face in your life: you may have stress at home, be stressed out by work, and the anxiety you feel around hospitals or before exams can be “stressful”. If you believe the headlines, the world is the most stressed out it’s ever been – and we are fretting our way throughout life.

Pick up any stress-management book or tap into a healthy-living website and you will encounter the classic stress story that we all undergo, the “fight-or-flight” survival response and its accompanying deluge of hormones when stressed. However, the body is far more sophisticated than we give it credit for. No two “stresses” are the same: being punched in the gut triggers a different biological response to the turmoil of a feud with a neighbour or the worry over a delayed pay cheque. Each demand (or “stressor”) placed on you has its own survival response.

Different kinds of stressors cause the body’s defensive systems to react in different ways: for example, a brief stress response triggers helpful infection-fighting chemicals, whereas longer term trauma can cause virus-attacking white blood cells to stop multiplying. Your responses also vary with age, past experiences, general health, and any past or existing medical conditions. You will undergo the most drastic fight-or-flight responses if you’re threatened or physically injured.

“Stress” has become such a fuzzy term, it’s no wonder we think there’s more of it in the world. While it can be a useful way to understand our responses to mental and physical challenges, labelling every negative experience as “stress” risks impoverishing our experience of the richness of what it is to be human.

How can I deal with constant stress?

RECURRENT, relentless demands and uncertainties really can harm your health. The body’s fight-or-flight response is a primal sledgehammer reaction that was a lifesaver for fending off predators, but is now utterly out of proportion for cracking the small nuts of modern life’s trials. With your emergency systems primed for a catastrophe your body’s internal chemistry is stretched to its limits. When fight-or-flight and stress hormones surge repeatedly over many days and weeks, it can cause damage to your internal organs, and brain.

Coping strategies are often the go-to technique for dealing with repeated or long-term stress, and many of these are critical for quelling an overactive fight-or-flight response, offering you essential time to relax and reflect. They might include making to-do lists, exercise, yoga, meditation, breathing exercises, or even just “me time”. These techniques are, however, all just an ice pack for soothing the fever and are rarely the cure. The best solution to never-ending pressures is to uproot the source and reframe how you think about the underlying problem.

If relentless pressure is putting your body on high-alert then you won’t be able to see beyond the immediate crisis. By seeking advice from a trusted friend or family member, fresh perspectives and solutions often appear. There is also measureable evidence that working through problems with a professional health worker will let you unpick destructive thoughts and habits, as well as make practical steps to alleviate near-constant stress.

Can stress ever be good for me?

If you have ever felt the motivational push of stress, you’ll know it can have its benefits. There’s a fine balance, however, to be kept between “good” and “bad” stress.

THE natural “stress” hormones your body produces, and their effects on the body, are vital in providing you with the energy, strength, and single-mindedness to overcome physical and mental challenges. If your body can’t produce enough cortisol to sustain you, then you’ll be weak and fatigued. Without cortisol, your blood pressure and blood sugar will drop, you will be thirsty, and a sudden injury, infection, or bout of strenuous exercise could even lead to sudden death.

Not only is a stress response key to keeping your alive, but moderate pressure in daily life can do you good: regular pulses of adrenaline and cortisol when you’re excited, motivated, or exercising improve concentration and provide small boosts in your mind.

Constant and extreme demands will always be harmful, and if you’re always feeling ill when away from the stressor, then that stress is doing you no good at all.

Balanced demands

When life is manageable, the stress response is invigorating and sustaining. But when your demands seem to exceed your capacity, the stress response is ever-present and damaging.  

. Science Book

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Arts, Christianity, History, Philosophy, Science

Christianity and philosophy

RENAISSANCE

THE doctrines of the Christian Church dominated the philosophy of medieval Europe. Christianity, especially in its early period, placed less emphasis on philosophical reasoning and more on faith and authority. Philosophy was regarded with suspicion, and the ideas of the Greek philosophers were initially considered incompatible with Christian belief.

The Church had a virtual monopoly on scholarship, but some Christian thinkers introduced elements of Greek philosophy, especially that of Plato and Aristotle. After careful examination by the authorities, many of these ideas were gradually integrated into doctrine. From the end of the Roman Empire to the 15th century, a distinct Christian philosophy evolved, starting with Augustine and culminating in the comprehensive philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

With the Renaissance, however, the authority of the Church in particular, was challenged by a resurgence of humanist views. Scientific discoveries contradicted core beliefs, and the invention of printing meant the Church could no longer control access to information.

The Scientific Revolution

Although the Renaissance was primarily an artistic and cultural movement, its emphasis on free thinking challenged the authority of religion and paved the way for an unprecedented age of scientific discovery.

Tradition undermined

The Scientific Revolution began with the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), which presented evidence contradicting the notion of a ‘geocentric universe’. That same year, Andreas Vesalius published De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), which overturned many orthodox ideas in anatomy and medicine. What followed was a profound change in the approach to enquiry into the natural world. Conventional wisdom, including the dogma of the Church, was no longer blindly accepted, but challenged. Even the work of Aristotle, who had initiated the idea of natural philosophy based on methodical observation, was subjected to scientific scrutiny.

At the forefront of this scientific revolution were philosophers such as Francis Bacon, whose Novum Organum (New Instrument) proposed a new method for the study of natural philosophy – systematically gathering evidence through observation, from which the laws of nature could be inferred. But there was also a new class of thinkers and scientists, including Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei. Galileo challenged dogma more than most by proving that the Earth orbits the Sun, and fell foul of the Church for his efforts.

The discoveries made by these scientists, and the methods they used, laid the foundations for the work of Isaac Newton in the following century, and also influenced philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, who helped to shape the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment.

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Environment, Government, Politics, Society, United Nations, United States

Globalised food systems are making hunger worse

LONG-READ: FOOD SUPPLY

Intro: Food disruptions from the pandemic to the war in Ukraine show the need for strong local supply chains. Yet the US and others won’t learn

FROM COVID-19 to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine to climate change, it seems all the calamities afflicting the world are converging to make hunger worse. The latest United Nations report on hunger finds the increase in the number of undernourished people globally this year has eliminated any progress over the past decade.

Yet while the world has not seen hunger at these levels for years, scholars have long warned that a catastrophe was looming. The world’s food system is more interconnected and complex than ever, built upon layers of transnational dependencies. It is why a war in Europe can exacerbate a famine in Somalia — a country which imports most of its wheat and saw its supply of bread all but collapse overnight when exports of Ukrainian wheat ceased.

But instead of reducing the fragility of the food system, the latest international efforts led by the United States to end hunger are only exacerbating it — especially for Africa — by globalising the system further. Just this week, US President Joe Biden has promised African leaders gathered in Washington that the United States is “all in” on Africa. But the US needs to make sure that it is “all in” the right way, particularly when it comes to food.

The current crisis began when multiple pandemic-related shocks converged on the system, including lockdowns, a global economic downturn, and illnesses among food system workers, especially factory workers and migrant labourers. Climate change-related weather events, inflation and the Ukraine war have aggravated these stresses, rendering a complex and highly industrialised food system unable to serve the neediest people in the world even as it maintains steady supplies for the Global North.

It is increasingly clear that in moments when the world is under severe stress, globalisation is not a strength but a weakness, not a foundation for the system’s stability but a reason for its fragility. Any calamity anywhere in the world — whether a viral outbreak, drought or conflict — is a shock to the entire system, but one felt most acutely by the most vulnerable people and in the most vulnerable places.

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