Attachment Theory

• Regardless of the predicament, the stress-response is always present.
• Adaptations brought about by the stress-response include entering a dormant state during food shortage or sticking poisonous chemicals in leaves when stressed by someone intent on eating you.
• The core of the stress-response is built around the fact that muscles are going to work intensely.
• The muscles need energy, right now, in the most readily utilizable form, rather than stored away somewhere in your fat cells.
• Rapid mobilization of energy from storage sites and the inhibition of further storage are hallmarks of the stress-response.
• Glucose and the simplest forms of proteins and fats pour out of your fat cells, liver, and muscles to fuel muscles.
• Heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate increase to transport nutrients and oxygen at greater rates.
• During an emergency, the body halts long-term, expensive building projects like digestion, growth, and reproduction.
• Digestion is inhibited, while growth and tissue repair are curtailed.
• Sexual drive decreases in both sexes.
• Females are less likely to ovulate or to carry pregnancies to term; males begin to have trouble with erections and secrete less testosterone.
• Immunity gets inhibited; the immune system is ideal for spotting the tumor cell that will kill you in a year, or making enough antibodies to protect you in a few weeks, but is it really needed right now?
• With sufficiently sustained stress, our perception of pain can become blunted, resulting in stress-induced analgesia, which is adaptive.
• During stress, certain aspects of memory improve and senses become sharper to help in emergencies.
• Collectively, the stress-response is ideally adapted for that zebra or lion.
• Energy mobilized and delivered the tissues that need them; long-term building and repair projects are deferred until the disaster has passed.
• Cognition is sharpened, and pain is blunted.
• Walter Cannon formulated the well-known "fight-or-flight" syndrome to describe the stress-response.
• Stressful events can sometimes make people sick.

Selye's Three-Part View of Stress-Response

• In the initial alarm stage a stressor is noted and alarms go off.
• The second stage (adaptation, or resistance) comes with the successful mobilization of the stress-response system and the attainment of allostatic balance.
• With prolonged stress one enters the third stage, "exhaustion," where stress-related diseases emerge due to depleted hormone stores.
• Crucial hormones are rarely depleted during even the most sustained stressors.
• The body spends so much on the defense budget that it neglects education, health care, and social services.
• With sufficient activation, the stress-response can become more damaging than the stressor, especially when the stress is purely psychological.
• Things that occur in reaction to stress are generally shortsighted, inefficient, and penny-wise and dollar-foolish, the sorts of costly things your body might do to respond effectively to an emergency.
• Constantly mobilizing energy at the cost of energy storage leads to fatigue and increases the risk of developing diabetes.
• Chronically activating the cardiovascular system can lead to a cardiovascular disaster.
• Constantly turning off long-term building projects means that nothing is ever repaired.
• Growth can be inhibited to the point of stress dwarfism, and tissue repair can be disrupted.
• Reproductive disorders may ensue; menstrual cycles become irregular or cease in females, and sperm count and testosterone levels may decline in males.
• Immune function suppression makes one more likely to fall victim to infectious diseases.
• The same systems of the brain that function more cleverly during stress can also be damaged by one class of hormones secreted during stress.
• Repeated stressors mean we may be able to precariously call on allostasis, but it doesn't come cheap, and the efforts to reestablish that balance will eventually wear us down.
• Those stress hormones released by a stressor can be thought of as two massive elephants on a seesaw.
• Diverting energy from various long-term building projects helps solve short-term stressful emergencies.
• The large energies of the two elephants are consumed balancing the seesaw, instead of being able to do something more useful.
• Damage will occur just because of how large elephants are: Squash the flowers, strew leftovers, wear out the seesaw faster (allostatic load).
• Solving one bit of imbalance brought on during stress by using massive levels of stress hormones can make a mess of something else in the process.
• It is hard solve one major problem in the body without knocking something else out of balance
• It's tough for the elephants to get off the seesaw.
• Stress-related disease can arise from turning off the stress-response too slowly or turning off the different components of the stress-response at different speeds.
• Having one of the hormones of the stress-response return to normal while another of the hormones is still being secreted like mad can be the equivalent of one elephant suddenly being left alone on the seesaw, crashing in earth.
• Two punch lines: Having an inability to appropriately turn on the stress-response during an acute physical challenge is big trouble (Addison's disease, Shy-Drager syndrome); The stress-response can eventually become damaging if repeatedly turned on, especially if you can't turn it off at the end of a stressful event.
• Stressors, even if massive, repetitive, or chronic, do not automatically lead to illness.
• Stress increases your risk of getting diseases that make you sick, or if you have such a disease, stress increases the risk of your defenses being overwhelmed by the disease.
• Stressors do not directly make you sick, rather, it's because you got disease X (and not because of some nonsense having to do with stress).

Book Breakdown

• Chapter 2 introduces the hormones and brain systems involved in the stress-response, specifically, which ones are activated vs inhibited during stress.
• Chapters 3 through 10 examine the individual systems of the body that are affected.
• Chapter 11 examines the interactions between stress and sleep, focusing on the vicious circle of how stress can disrupt sleep and how sleep deprivation stressor.
• Chapter 12 examines the role of stress in the aging process, plus the disturbing discoveries that sustained exposure to certain hormones may gigate the brain's aging.
• Chapter 13 explores why psychological stress is stressful.
• Chapter 14 reviews major depression, a psychiatric malady often closely related to psychological stress.
• Chapter 15 discusses connections between personality differences and individual differences in patterns of stress-related disease.
• Chapter 16 considers when stress feels good, and the interactions between the sense of pleasure that can be triggered by some stressors and the process of addiction.
• Chapter 17 considers what your place in society, and the type of society in which you live, has to do with patterns of stress-related disease.
• Final chapter gives some hope.

Glands, Gooseflesh, and Hormones

• The brain regulates functions throughout the rest of the body.
• Thinking a thought can cause your pancreas to secrete some hormone, your liver making an enzyme that wasn't there before, your spleen is text-messaging something to your thymus gland, and blood flow in little capillaries in your ankles has just changed.
• Learning the lines of communication between the brain and elsewhere is a prerequisite for seeing how the stress-response can save your neck during a sprint across the savanna, but make you sick during months of worry.

Stress and the Autonomic Nervous System

• The principal way which your brain tell the rest of the body what to do is to send messages through nerves that branch from your brain down your spine and out to the periphery of your body.
• The voluntary nervous system is a conscious communication system, but it is another branch of the nervous system that projects organs besides skeletal muscle, and this part controls the interesting things your body does blushing, getting gooseflesh, having an orgasm.
• Biofeedback consists of leaming to alter the automatic function consciously; potty training is also an example.
• The autonomic nervous system carries relatively involuntary and automatic messages, and has everything to do with your response to stress (one half of the system is activated in response to stress, and one half is suppressed).
• The sympathetic nervous system is the half of the autonomic nervous system that gets turned on in emergencies.
• Sympathetic projections exit your spine and branch out to nearly every organ, blood vessel, and sweat gland, helping to mediate vigilance, arousal, activation, and mobilization.
• The sympathetic nervous system mediates the four F behavior flight, fight, fright, and sex.
• Nerve endings of this system release adrenaline, and sympathetic nerve endings also release noradrenaline (epinephrine and norepinephrine).
• Epinephrine is secreted by the actions of the sympathetic nerve endings in your adrenal glands, and norepinephrine is secreted by all the other sympathetic nerve endings throughout the body.
• These are the chemical messengers that kick various organs into gear, within seconds.
• The parasympathetic component mediates calm, vegetative activities (promotes growth, energy storage, and other optimistic processes); sprinting means turning this component down.
• Sympathetic and parasympathetic projections from the brain corse their way out to a particular organ where, when activated, they bring about opposite results.

Your Brain: The Real Master Gland

• The sympathetic system (neural route) is a finil means by which the brain can mobilize waves of activity in response to stress.
• It is possible to mobilize waves of activity in response to stress hormones.
• A chemical messenger that travels a thousandth of an inch and causes the cell in line (another neuron) to do something different is a neurotransmitter when the sympathetic nerve endings in your heart secrete norepinephrine, it is playing a neurotransmitter role.
• If a neuron (or any cell) secretes a messenger that percolates in the bloodstream and affects events far and wide, that messenger is a hormone.
• Men's sexual drive declines with age because the testicles secrete less male sex hormone, testosterone; prescribing testicular extracts was an attempted medical treatment to reverse (or slow) aging.
• Peripheral hormone-secreting glands were automan- under the control of something else the pituitary gland released hormones that kicked other glands into action.
• The pituitary contains a whole array of hormones that run the show throughout the rest of the body; it is the pituitary that alally knows the game plan and regulates what all the other glands do hence, the "master gland."
• Removing the pituitary from a body and putting it in small bowl filled with pituitary nutrients causes it to acts abnormally.
• Destroying the part of the brain right near the pituitary causes the pituitary to stop secreting hormones/ secrete too much of (tells you that the brain controls certain pituitary hormones by stimulating/by inhibiting).
• Geoffrey Harris proposed that the brain was also a hormonal gland: Secreting hormones that traveled to the pituitary and directed the pituitary's actions.
• Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally proved Harries was right.

The Guillemin and Schally Experiment

• Two scientists, Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally, looked for brain hormones.
• The brain communicates with the pituitary by a miniscule circulatory system, only slightly larger than the period at the end of this sentence.
• One of the major challenges lies in being to gather tissue "containing those blood vessels going from the brain to the pituitary.
• To accomplish this they began collecting animal brains: Cut out the part at the base of the brain, near the pituitary, throw the contents of those pig sheep brains into a huge-test tube filled with chemicals purify the mash collect the droplets inject those droplets into a rat if rat's pituital hormone changes, the droplets contain one of those hormones, and isolate hormones.
• Result: Invent new types of chemistry to living body of hormones that may/may not exist.
• They discovered releasing hormones and inhibiting hormones, but the factor in the "Augean task" was the (minuscule) scale.
• The field of neuroscience was transformed forever.

Hormones of the Stress-Response

• The brain can do some very complicated tricks by activating hormones related to the SNS.
• Two hormones vital to the stress-response are epinephrine and norepinephrine, released by the sympathetic nervous system.
• The other important class of hormones are steroid hormones: androgen, estrogen, progestin,
• Secreted by the adrenal gland, and act in siglar ways to epinephrine.
• Epinephrine (Seconds), glucocorticoids back mins/hrs.
• Stressor sensed in brain CRH release to the hypothalamus.