Researchers Find That Stress Does a Body Good
January 07, 2011
A University of New Orleans psychology professor is among the co-authors of a journal article concluding that, contrary to popular belief, stress is actually beneficial to the human body.
The article, which will appear in the March 2011 issue of the international journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, was co-authored by UNO stress physiologist Birdie Shirtcliff and evolutionary psychologists Marco Del Giudice of the University of Turin and Bruce Ellis of the University of Arizona. The review is entitled “The Adaptive Calibration Model of stress responsivity.”
According to Shirtcliff, there is an enormous amount of conferences, books and journals devoted to the negative effects of stress, but very little research has been done on why stress is bad.
“What we found was very surprising,” Shirtcliff said. “We didn’t find that stress is bad. Stress is actually a very good way for our body to make sure that it can manage or cope with the environment and make the most of it; it is adaptive.”
This collaboration between evolutionary psychologists and stress physiologists was uniquely suited to address why some things are stressful, Shirtcliff said. The researchers used the idea of evolution to guide their exploration of stress. They propose that things are stressful when they require humans to adapt to something new in the environment. Most often, these are “fitness-relevant” things such as novel surroundings, new relationships or changes in social relationships. The human body calibrates to the new surroundings so that the individual can be best-suited for their environment, for better and for worse.
“Our bodies respond to stress as a wake-up call, telling us that there’s something really important going on that we need to pay attention to and remember,” Shirtcliff said. “It keeps us focused on things that matter for our survival. Our bodies make sure that the next time we find ourselves in that situation, we’re prepared for it.”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and the official journal of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society.