Psychological stress can crush a cow to death

This sentence is really not alarmist - the "cow" here does not generally refer to farm cattle, but refers to individuals with as strong physiological tolerance as cattle. As long as they encounter acute excessive psychological shock or are immersed in chronic stress for a long time, they may suffer from physiological collapse, cognitive disability, and even sudden death. This conclusion has been confirmed by both neuroscience and clinical medicine, and it is by no means a chicken soup-style scare for the soul.

When I was a trainee in the psychiatric department two years ago, I met a freight driver. He was 38 years old, 1.85 meters tall, and could carry 200 kilograms of goods up to the third floor without gasping for breath. People around him called him "Li Niuzi". He never took medicine even for colds and fevers. He just covered his head and slept. During that time, he caught up with his family to collect the maternity expenses for the second child and the junior high school selection fee for the older child. The truck he just bought was scratched and he had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. He traveled across the province for 14 days in a row. On the last trip, he just unzipped the cargo box at the unloading yard and fell straight to the ground. After being sent to the hospital, it was found that there was no cerebral hemorrhage or trauma. The final diagnosis was ventricular fibrillation caused by acute stress. After being rescued, he lay in bed for half a month and could not even carry a mineral water bottle full of water.

Don’t believe it, I used to think that this kind of thing was a small probability. It wasn’t until I saw the experimental data on mice in the neuroscience laboratory that I realized that the destructive power of stress on physiology is much greater than we imagined. The "stress" we often refer to is not an emotional pretense at all. It is the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (in human terms, it is the body's stress switch) that is stuck in the "on" position, constantly sending signals to the whole body that "it is in danger and needs to run away." Cortisol continues to rise, blood vessels constrict, heart rate soars, and the immune system can collapse by half in half a month. Acute overpressure is like tightening the reins of a cow to the point where the neck is about to break. No matter how strong an individual is, his or her heart may stop beating on the spot. Most of the runners who died suddenly in the previous marathons who had far superior physical fitness than ordinary people were due to the combination of long-term sleep deprivation before the race and stress and stress overload during the race.

However, not all opinions in the academic world are one-sided. Scholars who do cognitive behavioral research believe that "whether stress can crush people to death" is essentially a subjective question. They were also deducted 500 yuan from their performance. Some people felt that the sky was falling and they couldn't make up the rent this month. They kept their eyes open all night until dawn. ； Some people thought it was just a warning to them for their recent fishing, so they turned around and went downstairs to eat a bowl of pan noodles with sausage, but nothing happened. A friend of mine who works in enterprise EAP talked to me some time ago and said that the most "hard-working" person he had ever seen was the operation and maintenance of an Internet company. He spent three months dealing with computer room failures and only slept 3 hours a day. Instead, he became more energetic the more he worked. When I asked him why, he said that after completing these projects, he could be promoted to technical director, and his annual salary would triple. "I am not taking pressure, but saving myself a wife." You see, when you think of stress as a "tree to climb" rather than a "rock to carry," your tolerance will really be much higher.

Of course, this is not absolute. I have seen several counter-examples, and even my friends who do research find it outrageous. Last year, a 62-year-old old woman came to the community for help. Her son died in a car accident the year before, her husband suffered a stroke and was paralyzed in bed. The family also owed more than 300,000 yuan in foreign debt. Her relatives and neighbors thought she would not survive for half a year. As a result, she pushed a cart every day to sell braised vegetables in front of the school. In three years, she paid off most of the debt. Her husband can now walk slowly while holding on to a frame. You said she has no pressure? Impossible. She said that sometimes she would go home at night and look at her husband lying on the bed and want to shed tears, but she would turn around and comfort herself, "If I collapse, this family will really be gone. I grit my teeth and get over it." Do you think this is due to a special physiological structure or strong cognitive ability? No one can explain clearly that human resilience can never be quantified using laboratory scales.

I have been doing psychological counseling for so many years, and I have never said to a client, "You have to be more open-minded," or "This little pressure is nothing." When the pressure really comes up, don't bear it hard. You think you can pull a thousand-jin ox, but you never know when the last straw will fall on your back. You don’t have to force yourself to be an emotionally stable adult every day. When you feel really uncomfortable, go squat on the side of the road for ten minutes, buy a bottle of iced Coke and drink it down, or find an empty stairwell to curse. There’s really no shame in it.

As the old saying goes, "Strength is not a loss", but in psychology, it is never about how big you are or whether you can handle things at ordinary times. Really, don’t think of yourself as a bully. You know how to give up when the bull is tired. Why are you insisting?