That's a Stress Response

But here’s the problem with modernity. We live in a time where we are surrounded by stressors. Right now, I have 56 emails in my inbox that need my attention. My body is responding to that with stress (this body of ours is also not great at knowing the difference between life-and-death stressors and the kinds of stressors that won’t kill me). My un

“I don’t think most people understand weathering stress. Stress is such a vague term,” Geronimus said. “But it still gives us a leverage point to get in there and see a more complex and more frightening picture of what it does to people’s bodies and whose bodies it does it to.”

Stress can change the body at a cellular level.

She said she was trying to capture two things. First, that people’s varied life experiences affect their health by wearing down their bodies. And second, she said: “People are not just passive victims of these horrible exposures. They withstand them. They struggle against them. These are people who weather storms.”

People seem to instinctively under

Stress exposes the false narrative. After the stress from our hills, or the mental stress from our imagined hills, we learn to rebuild our form. We learn to reframe. We learn to separate who we are from what we do. We learn we are secure regardless of how others treat us. We are not defined by what happens in our mission. We are not defined by our

While stress has a bad reputation, our human response to stress was actually developed as a survival mechanism to prepare us to fight, flee, or freeze. However, our brains have not yet evolved to understand that sending the wrong text to a friend or trying to speak Spanish in la panadería in Seville is not, in fact, a risk to our life. Our brain ca