Welcome back to The Study Podcast. Today: stress and illness, the mind-body link.
When most people think of stress, they think of feelings, anxiety, frustration, overwhelm. But stress is also a measurable physiological process, and that's why it matters in nursing.
The foundational model is Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome, or GAS. Selye, working in the 1930s, noticed that lab rats exposed to almost any harmful stimulus showed the same three-stage response: alarm, resistance, exhaustion. He argued the same pattern happens in humans.
In the alarm stage, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in. Adrenaline floods the bloodstream, heart rate and blood pressure spike, blood is shunted to the muscles, and you're ready to fight or flee. This is the famous "fight-or-flight" response.
If the stressor continues, you move into resistance. The HPA axis, hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal cortex, starts pumping out cortisol. Cortisol mobilises glucose, suppresses inflammation, and dampens the immune response. This is helpful in the short term but damaging if it goes on for weeks or months.
Eventually, if the stress is unrelenting, you reach exhaustion. Cortisol levels drop, immune function collapses, and the body becomes vulnerable to illness, cardiovascular disease, depression, gastric ulcers, infections.
For your Health Psychology assignment, you should know three classic studies cold: Holmes and Rahe's 1967 Social Readjustment Rating Scale; Brady's 1958 "executive monkey" experiments; and Kiecolt-Glaser's 1984 work on caregiver immune function. Each one demonstrates a different facet of the stress-illness link.
And clinically? When you're assessing a patient on a ward, ask about stressors. Bereavement, financial worry, relationship breakdown, these aren't soft factors. They're measurable risk factors for the next physical illness you'll see them with. That's the holistic, biopsychosocial model the NMC expects you to bring to practice.
Next week: Episode 3, health inequalities. Thanks for listening.