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26. It's stress. The stress of modern living. Of course we have more illness.

(This is not entirely different than questions 9 and 23, but it deserves its own reply.)

In the old days, being chased by panthers, fighting the barbarians, or knowing you could be facing them tomorrow wasn't exactly restful, either.

More to the point, to cite ”stress” really just restates the question, rather than answering it – a little like the ancient “explanation” for opium's ability to send us to sleep: “that it has a soporific principle”. Sure, too much extra sound in the environment hurts us – that's what stress means = but how? Lack of exercise hurts us – but just how and why? Not getting enough bright light, etc., etc. - but just exactly how? At least part of the reason why for all the factors I just listed (and many more) is that we get to bed later and expose ourselves to more light if there is more noise in our environment, if we don't tire ourselves out with exercise, and if we don't experience some very bright light during the day that revs us up.

Of course we are doing a lot every day, nowadays. Artificial light has everything to do with that. As long as we keep the lights on, our brains think it's still daylight and keep pushing as forward, even long into the night. We tend to keep active and under white light until we finally can't even think straight, or are too tired to move any more; and finally collapse into bed. What could possibly be more thoroughly calculated to stress out our bodies and minds, pushing them far past their natural limits every day of our lives? The solution is to turn off the light, not to find a still better energy drink, smoke more, up our caffeine consumption, or read another motivational best-seller.

Extra long exposure to light is the major source of harmful stress for modern human beings – what we usually call stress are precisely those those things which cause us to get to bed later or make it more likely that we will sleep less soundly, get up in the night and turn on the lights to read, think, or just get to the bathroom. (One could also list extra work load and caretaking for an ill spouse, which are also known to make chronic illnesses much more likely. [Mortality after the Hospitalization of a Spouse, N. A. Christakis, P. D. Allison, NEJM 354:719-730 no.7])

Grief and post traumatic stress syndrome are not exceptions in this respect. The most predictable result of these tremendous sources of stress is that we don't sleep well (or at all, or not without periods of wakefulness) and stay in the light for abnormally long periods of time. The effects of this extra light exposure not only accumulate but can snowball, which may be why post traumatic stress syndrome really hits only a few weeks after the traumatic event, and not immediately. The best predictor of whether soldiers will experience post traumatic stress syndrome is not what they've experienced, or for how long, but whether the pain from their wounds is severe enough to alter their sleep patterns.

When suffering from such truly terrible stresses, the best thing we can do for ourselves is to make certain that whether we are sleeping normally or not, we are nevertheless in the dark for normal amounts of time and at consistent times of the day. This will allow normal healing to take place instead of a spiral of “stress”, which can simply mean the absence of darkness and the normal daily hormonal cycle.

In nature, without artificial lights, we might stay awake longer and wake more after a terrible event; but night and darkness would inevitably come and our normal hormonal processes would still occur whether we were awake or not, thus allowing us to heal whether we willed it or not. Nowadays, with a light-switch always nearby, the process of grief or shock can become a vicious circle that makes us more anxious and out of sorts causing us to stay up, which makes us still more anxious and out of sorts, and therefore likely to stay up or sleep less soundly, etc.

No wonder modern life is “stressful.” Any stress can easily become a vicious circle in which we never get enough darkness. What most distinguishes modern industrial life from ancient times is that we have given up a mandatory twelve hour vacation every single day in which to sleep, think, relax, listen to music, chat and make love at our leisure – while all the while feeling a bit stoned, or at least awfully mellow as our hormone system works to maintain and repair every one of our cells during the night, and manufactures copious amounts of serotonin and other feel good hormones for the next day. We have also given up the long nights during which we make stronger collagen in the dark – weakening us because collagen is the very glue that holds our bodies together. Given all this, needless to say, modern life feels “stressful.” How could it not?