How much stress can you cope with?

Do you remember the movie TITANIC? 2200 people went into the icy cold North Atlantic waters, but when morning came, only 700 people survived. Why? Everyone has a different range of adaptability to handle stress. Let’s talk about this a little more.

Dr. Hans Selye, a pioneer of modern stress research, explained that we each have a range of adaptability to stress. Your ability to adapt to stress is managed by your nervous system. Even though you may be born with an inherently wide range of adaptability, that range can become narrowed. If your nervous system is disturbed by subluxation, your ability and potential to adapt to stress is diminished progressively.

Note the diagrams below. The “squiggly” line that looks like the Dow Jones Average represents the stress in a “normal life” over time. The time could be a day, a month, a year, or a whole lifetime. The peaks are events or times of high stress; the valleys are times of lower stress. The parallel lines in each diagram represent three different ranges of adaptability to stress.

In Range 1, you will see that stress greatly exceeds that person’s ability to cope most of the time.
What kind of health problems do these people develop?

They can develop serious, debilitating health problems like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

In Range 2 the stress levels occasionally exceed, for a short time, their ability to adapt or cope. What kind of health problems do people in Range 2 develop?

They can develop annoying, chronic health problems like back pain, neck pain, headaches, digestive problems, breathing problems, allergies, numbness and tingling.

The people in Range 3 experience the same stress as the other two people, but their range of adaptability is so wide that stress has little or no effect on their health.

So, which range do you suppose the 700 survivors of the Titanic belonged to?

Which Range of stress are you?

What are you doing that is widening your range of adaptability or narrowing it?