Tons of products and treatments in the wellness category seek to treat stress and inflammation with everything from relaxing massage to acupuncture to restrictive anti-inflammatory diets. But in doing so, it’s easy to fall into fear-based marketing. What happens when I can’t follow a restrictive anti-inflammatory diet? Once, when I asked a paragon of alternative health this very question, she shrugged, “You don’t really have a choice.” Cortisol shot up my spine like a geyser.
We all know this intuitively, but ignore the consequences of excess stress.
These effects of stress exist on a bell curve — that is, some is good, but too much becomes bad: As the nervous system secretes more and more stress hormones, performance increases, but up to a point; after that tipping point, performance begins to suffer as the hormones continue to flow. What makes stress “bad” — that is, what makes it render us more pervious to disease — is the disparity between the nervous system and immune system’s respective pace.
Needull in a haystack 