When is stress good for you?
Bruce McEwen
The subtle flows and toxic hits of stress get under the skin, making and breaking the body and brain over a lifetime
压力的微妙涌动和有毒攻击钻进了皮肤,终身改变和破坏着身体和大脑。
Stress pervades our lives. We become anxious when we hear of violence, chaos or discord. And, in our relatively secure world, the pace of life and its demands often lead us to feel that there is too much to do in too little time. This disrupts our natural biological rhythms and encourages unhealthy behaviours, such as eating too much of the wrong things, neglecting exercise and missing out on sleep.
压力弥散在我们的生活中,当我们听到暴力、混乱和不和时,就会变得焦虑不安。而且,这个相对安全的世界里的生活节奏和生活需求,常常使我们感到在有限的时间里有太多的事情要做。这扰乱了我们的自然生物节律,助长了不健康的行为,比如吃了太多错误的东西、忽视了锻炼、错过了睡眠。
Racial and ethnic discrimination, along with lack of educational opportunities and economic advancement take their toll on a large segment of the population in the United States. Incarceration is the rule rather than the exception for some of the most vulnerable. Adverse experiences in infancy and childhood, including poverty, leave a lifelong imprint on the brain and body, and undermine long-term health, increasing the incidence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, substance abuse, anti-social behaviour and dementia. How does all of this stress ‘get under our skin’? What does it do to our brains and our bodies? What can we do about it? And is stress so multifaceted and pervasive that we could have trouble controlling it at all?
种族和民族歧视,加上缺乏教育机会和经济发展机会,使很大一部分美国人口付出了代价。对于某些最弱的群体而言,监禁是规则而不是例外。包括贫穷在内的婴儿和儿童时期的不幸经历给大脑和身体留下终生印记,并损害长期健康,增加心血管疾病、糖尿病、抑郁症、药物滥用、反社会行为和痴呆的发生率。所有这些压力是如何“深入我们的皮肤”的?它对我们的大脑和身体有什么影响?我们能做什么?压力是如此的多方面和普遍性,以至于我们根本无法控制它们么?
The psychologist Jerome Kagan at Harvard University recently complained that the word ‘stress’ has been used in so many ways as to be almost meaningless; he suggests it’s warranted only for the most extreme circumstances or damaging events. But my decades of experience suggest another approach. The insidious power of stress to ‘get under the skin’ was the focus of a MacArthur Foundation Research Network that I joined more than two decades ago, uniting me with social scientists, physicians and epidemiologists around a common problem: how to measure and evaluate stress from our social and physical environments. Our collaboration, continued under the auspices of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, has shown that stress acts on the body and brain, profoundly influencing health and disease.
哈佛大学的心理学家杰罗姆·卡根(Jerome Kagan)最近抱怨说,“压力”一词已经被过度使用,几乎没有任何意义。他建议仅在最极端的情况下或有破坏性的事件中使用它。但是我数十年的经验提出了另一种方法。压力隐匿在皮肤下的强大力量是我二十多年前加入的麦克阿瑟基金会研究网络的重点,该网络将我与社会科学家,医师和流行病学家联合起来,围绕着一个常见问题:如何衡量和评估压力来自我们的社交和自然环境。在国家儿童发展科学委员会的主持下,我们的合作表明,压力作用于身体和大脑,深刻影响健康和疾病。