Elephant in the Room: Stress!

Why are we so stressed out?

To detox, we need to understand stress.

Two Types of Stress:

To understand the causes of stress, we need to first know there are two kinds of stress: acute stress and chronic stress.

See, stress in our daily life is just like hurt or pain - they are there to protect us from further harm.

When people or animals experience an immediate threat to their well-being, they know something is wrong and danger might be there if we don't do something, thus acute stress occurs to alert us. Think about when we could not find our wallet or cellphones, the stress response kicks in to help us respond to the event. Once the event is over, our body returns to normal and the stress is gone.

These days, when people talk about stress, they usually mean chronic stress that's always there, in the background ready to rise up.

Animals don't seem to experience chronic stress, except those that live around human beings (yeah, and we thought they were the trouble makers.) - those we abuse or keep in cages. When left along, animals don't appear to have chronic stress like we do.

Three Causes of Chronic Stress:

There are three reasons why we are far more chronically stressed than animals or our prehistorical ancestors.

1. We changed our environment drastically

Wild animals live in pretty much the same environments like they have been living for millions of years in their evolution. We don't. We have changed our environment so much that most things that create chronic stress are the recent developments of civilization and culture, including traffic jams, computer crashes, constant interruptions and noise, air travel, financial market mess and stock market volatility.

2. We changed from being in immediate-return environment to being in delayed-return environment, thus uncertainty about the future rise.

No, I am not talking about the interest rate and long term treasury bond.

Wild animals live in immediate-return environment, while we found ourselves in a delayed-return environment ever since we started to rely on farming about 10,000 years ago (at the start of the agricultural revolution when we began to settle into permanent communities, build houses and grow our own food.)

In the immediate-return environment, animals get immediate feedback to know how things are going, or if their effort, responses to events work. (Well, if you get eaten, you get eaten, but at least you know the outcome right then.) Our ancestors also lived like that until very recently. They wandered around, searching for foods, dealing with threats or predators, interacting with other human beings and raising kids. Day to day, moment to moment they had constant feedback about how they were doing in meeting goals. Prehistorically, people couldn't do much for the future so they were focusing on meeting their day to day needs and there were very little uncertainty about how well they were doing.

These days we spend most of our time and effort for future goals. Can this relationship work out? Can we find a job after four years of college? When we put all our time and effort into something, there is no assurance that our hard work will pay off and the uncertainty about the future causes us constant stress.

3. To make things worst, there is often nothing we can do about it.

Just like the return is delayed, the threat is also delayed in the future, and it is in our mind rather than immediately present, even though it's every bit real. Our human nature wants to take action to remove the stressors but we find ourselves not able to do anything about it at the moment. Therefore, we feel frustrated and stressed out when we worry about things in the future that we have no control over.


Well, happiness and stresses are both connected to our well-being and eating well is part of the whole so we have to take a holistic approach. When we are off balance, we tend to stress eat without really enjoying, savoring and tasting whatever food has to offer and that's sad.