What is stress

It may be hard to imagine a time before cities, meetings, and deadlines but it is said that the earliest versions of recognizable human ancestors are estimated to be from over 2 million years ago. Fossils of humans in our current evolved form have been found and dated to be 200,000 years old. Industrialize humans have only been around for 250 years and as such our current way of life is far different to the way humans have evolved.

It may be obvious to say primitive humans didn’t have cars to escape from dangerous predators or sophisticated weapons to fight them off. Somewhere through genetics there existed a group of Humans whom having encountered such a threat their hypothalamus, a part of the brain responsible for regulating hormones, tells the body to release more adrenaline and cortisol to physically prepare to “fight or flight”.

The adrenaline will increase the function of your heart to help pump blood throughout your body so your muscles can respond quicker, it bind to cells in your lungs enabling you to be able to breath faster and take in more oxygen, it also generates other small reactions in the body almost making you some kind of mini-super-soldier whom can lift cars off of small children in trouble.

Cortisol is used by your body to help process blood sugar and stored fats to generate energy. It also helps your brain control your mood and fear. This helps to be able to respond to a threat in such a way that would result in our early relatives having a higher chance of survival than those who didn’t have such a “stress reaction”. As such humans with an evolved stress reaction were more likely to survive on 200,000-year-ago-earth and pass this biological reaction to their children, compared to a human who may have not even been scared of the charging bear coming right at them.

While it wasn’t everyday early man may have encountered a bear in their face while walking to the nearby stream to get water; In today’s modern society human’s perceive threats that trigger their stress reaction more frequently. Examples of potential causes of stress can include; driving in traffic and you get cut off by a big truck, watching dramatic tv shows, intense conversations with coworkers or friends, receiving dislikes on your social media post, or running behind on a timeline where you may feel your job and livelihood can be endangered if you don’t deliver a high quality feature.

Depending on how you perceive daily situations one person is likely to experience a heightened or lowered stress reaction to similar situations. And while this stress reaction of increased adrenaline and cortisol release has helped humans escape threats our bodies are not evolved to handle this for long periods of time. People that experience frequent heightened periods of stress responses are more at risk of also experiencing a type of reaction that people now call burnout.

Burning up and Burning out

The room suddenly felt as if the temperature had went from 70 to 100; I looked around at all the senior engineers and managers that I was about to give my first large presentation to and seeing if they too looked hot. Obviously not since several big dogs from out of town were still wearing sweatshirts and jackets.

I had been preparing for this demo for the past week and knew in my mind I would nail this but something about public speaking to this many higher ups was intimidating. I could feel the antonymous negative thoughts kicking in, “You’re going to forget your slides and how your service works. They’ll surely laugh at you when you blank on what to say and have to run out of the room and move back to the mid-west in your mother’s basement. Whelp it was good while it lasted.”

The fight or flight reaction was kicking in at full steam as they announced me to present. I went slide through slide as I prepared but there were more “ums” than I’d hoped for but overall it went fine. The audience all clapped at the end and some even gave positive feedback and contributed some ideas I could bring into the project I just spent the last 50 minutes talking about. However, My body felt as if I just been hit by a truck. When I came home I swear I instantly slept for the next 12 hours.

I woke up the next day with a cold and was really dragging at work. I was more silent than normal during meetings and noticeably slower at writing working efficient code. Luckily it was a Friday and I’d be able to sleep it off but this was all tell tale signs of burnout from the preparation I put into the presentation while having to maintain my normal job duties.