Stress - Nature's way of telling us something.
Tyaeda
Published
09/13/2011
I think about nature a lot. I often compare our species to those in the wild.
We all know what stress is. We all know that it can cause serious, life threatening health problems in people. But do we know why stress occurs? We know why we experience physical pain - it's how we know something is physically wrong with us. So why stress? What is nature trying to tell us?
A possible solution came to me while I was watching a show about a zoo. They were talking about all of the different animals, and how each enclosure had to be carefully planned out, so the animals would not get "stressed" and die. I watched another show about a shark. This shark was special because it held the world record for longest survival in captivity. Apparently, no one had kept that species of shark in captivity longer than a few days because they kept dying from stress. The common cause of stress amongst all of these animals was the fact that they were not in their natural habitat. They were unable to do what nature designed them for. But why? As humans we understand what all of those animals eat, their mating patterns, their biology... we are able to give them everything they physically need to stay alive. Is this stress, and the death it causes a way for nature to maintain it's balance? Natural selection even. If it's not balanced, if it's not correct - nature rejects and removes it.
Can that be applied to human stress? Do we experience stress because we are not doing what nature designed us for? It's obvious that we have rejected nature's balance, fought natural selection, etc. I highly doubt that we were designed to take oil out of the ground and power machines and make plastics out of it. Technically, it is possible to live your entire life in a building, without ever having to leave for anything - we can enlist in the assistance we would need to do that. (People actually do this... it's not a very socially acceptable behavior, but people do it because they can.) I highly doubt that's what nature wanted us to do.
We've all heard the saying, "Everyone experiences stress". But does that really mean we're all supposed to? Is stress the compromise we make to live the lives that we do? If so, does that make what we've become incorrect? Is nature trying to renew balance in our species, by attempting to kill us off?
Maybe, to cure stress, we should pay attention to what we were designed to do as animals, and not just the all powerful intelligent species. At the end of the day nature always wins. We have yet to cure death. Hell, we can't perfectly duplicate nature's balanced system, although we try. There is no such thing as an entirely man made/controlled ecosystem... the closest we have come is using our understanding of nature, and applying it's existing laws purposely. And even then, that usually occurs after we have destroyed the natural balance that originated.
For example, we plant forests, but we don't actually manufacture the trees, or physically make them grow... nature does... we just used nature's way in order to accomplish it.
Playing god, as it's usually called, has both helped and hurt our planet. We are fighting a war we cannot win. We will never cure every disease. We will never be able to exist %100 independent from nature's provisions. Yet we try.... and that really stresses me out.
We all know what stress is. We all know that it can cause serious, life threatening health problems in people. But do we know why stress occurs? We know why we experience physical pain - it's how we know something is physically wrong with us. So why stress? What is nature trying to tell us?
A possible solution came to me while I was watching a show about a zoo. They were talking about all of the different animals, and how each enclosure had to be carefully planned out, so the animals would not get "stressed" and die. I watched another show about a shark. This shark was special because it held the world record for longest survival in captivity. Apparently, no one had kept that species of shark in captivity longer than a few days because they kept dying from stress. The common cause of stress amongst all of these animals was the fact that they were not in their natural habitat. They were unable to do what nature designed them for. But why? As humans we understand what all of those animals eat, their mating patterns, their biology... we are able to give them everything they physically need to stay alive. Is this stress, and the death it causes a way for nature to maintain it's balance? Natural selection even. If it's not balanced, if it's not correct - nature rejects and removes it.
Can that be applied to human stress? Do we experience stress because we are not doing what nature designed us for? It's obvious that we have rejected nature's balance, fought natural selection, etc. I highly doubt that we were designed to take oil out of the ground and power machines and make plastics out of it. Technically, it is possible to live your entire life in a building, without ever having to leave for anything - we can enlist in the assistance we would need to do that. (People actually do this... it's not a very socially acceptable behavior, but people do it because they can.) I highly doubt that's what nature wanted us to do.
We've all heard the saying, "Everyone experiences stress". But does that really mean we're all supposed to? Is stress the compromise we make to live the lives that we do? If so, does that make what we've become incorrect? Is nature trying to renew balance in our species, by attempting to kill us off?
Maybe, to cure stress, we should pay attention to what we were designed to do as animals, and not just the all powerful intelligent species. At the end of the day nature always wins. We have yet to cure death. Hell, we can't perfectly duplicate nature's balanced system, although we try. There is no such thing as an entirely man made/controlled ecosystem... the closest we have come is using our understanding of nature, and applying it's existing laws purposely. And even then, that usually occurs after we have destroyed the natural balance that originated.
For example, we plant forests, but we don't actually manufacture the trees, or physically make them grow... nature does... we just used nature's way in order to accomplish it.
Playing god, as it's usually called, has both helped and hurt our planet. We are fighting a war we cannot win. We will never cure every disease. We will never be able to exist %100 independent from nature's provisions. Yet we try.... and that really stresses me out.
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