It is a well-known fact that over 60% of visits to GPs are stress related.

This is not to say that those patients who visit their GPs are not suffering from legitimate physical ailments, or that they only have imaginary symptoms. However, after running a comprehensive battery of medical tests, it is not unusual for doctors to report that they are unable to find anything physically wrong with their patient.

To understand the importance of the stress response, it is helpful to know a little bit about the functionality of the mind/body system. All living creatures have a built-in safety response to danger, which is known as the fight-or-flight response. This is the automatic unconscious reaction we have to actual or perceived danger.

Imagine that you are walking down the street when a driver loses control of his car and heads right at you. You don’t have the time to consciously think about the best action to take. You are not going to stop and try to decide if the driver is drunk or has simply lost control of the car or is trying to avoid running over a small animal.

No, you are quite simply and automatically going to jump out of the way.

To make this possible your brain is going to release a cocktail of chemicals and hormones into your bloodstream to enable you to move rapidly and save your life. As part of this automatic reaction, your heart is going to beat faster, your blood pressure is going to increase, you will breathe more rapidly, your digestive system is going to shut down, the blood circulation to your hands and feet will decrease as the body pumps blood to your major muscle groups, which will tense up ready for action enabling you to marshal all of your physical resources to jump out of the way and survive.

Centuries ago, primitive man would have had the same reaction when his life was threatened by a large and hungry predator. His body would have prepared itself in the same way and he would have fought back or run away. The difference is that when he ran away, he would have burnt up all of the adrenalin and other released chemicals - and by the time he stopped running, his metabolism would have returned to normal.

The problem today is that the Limbic system, which is the part of the brain that deals automatically with stressful situations, cannot tell the difference between real and imagined threats and perhaps most importantly of all, it deals with perceived emotional threats in the same way as it would with actual life-threatening situations.

This means that the multiple stressors of modern life can set off an almost constant barrage of mini-fight-or-flight responses which we hardly notice, subjecting our bodies to a serious overload of stress hormones, increased blood pressure and rapid heartbeat. All of this can lead to digestive problems and substantially increased muscle tension with resultant problems such as lower back and neck pain as well as migraines.

Primitive man was able to burn up this temporary cocktail of hormones quite easily through his sustained physical activity. Today, modern man is condemned to carry around this excessive chemical load, as most people don’t go for a five mile run after being called into the boss’ office for a performance review and by the time you use up the first batch of chemicals, something else will probably have occurred to fire off the response again.

As an analogy, one cup of coffee in the morning might help to get ready for the day ahead. Two cups of coffee every hour throughout the day will leave you with the jitters and insomnia.

A small glass of wine with dinner may help you to relax. Three bottles of wine every day will lead to major health problems.

Can we avoid the stresses of modern day life? The answer is clearly NO.

Can we learn how to take steps to control our reaction to these health-threatening stresses? Fortunately, the answer is YES.