We have two different protection mechanisms. The immune system deals with internal threats like viruses, bacteria, parasites, or cancer cells. The adrenal system secretes stress hormones that protect us against exterior threats like a poisonous snake or an attacker. Stress hormones cause the blood vessels of the gut to constrict and they also cause the immune system to shut off. The reason for that is very obvious: if you are being chased by a lion, you don’t put energy into fighting off a bacterial infection; you put it all into running. The medical professional has known for years that stress hormones shut off the immune system. They provide recipients of grafted tissues or organs with stress hormones, so that their immune systems do not reject the grafted foreign tissue. But what does this mean in the operation of our day-to-day lives? Every day, as we experience stress we’re debilitating our immune system.

As we repress the immune system, common everyday things can start to take over and create disease. Most people are very familiar with this because as we find more stress in our lives we get weaker and sicknesses becomes the way of life. Kids at school, for example, are more likely to get sick around exam time. The concept that we have to catch something is silly because it turns out that most of us have almost all of the pathogens that affect humans in our bodies already. The stress that inhibits the immune system also shuts down growth processes that replace cells lost to normal attrition. With enough stress, there will be a point where the numbers of cells lost and not replaced will compromise our functions and we will start to express a disease.

There is another factor of stress that I refer to as “adding-insult-to-injury.” Stress hormones cause the blood vessels in the forebrain to constrict, forcing the blood to the hindbrain to nourish the high-speed reflex center used in stressful conditions. Basically, constricting the blood vessels in the forebrain shuts down consciousness and intelligence. So an interesting and unwanted aspect of the stress response is that we become less intelligent when we are under stress. Therefore, a group of people or a nation that is bathed in fear is less intelligent than a nation that is living in growth and harmony; those living in fear will make “hindbrain” reflex decisions that may be inappropriate. This may account for some of the conditions of the world we live in right now because the fear levels are so great. It becomes incumbent upon us to recognize that our biology doesn’t know the difference between a real fear and a made-up fear. The simple reality is that our perceptions and beliefs, whether right or wrong, are still going to control our biology.

Our biology did not intend for us to engage stress mechanisms as a twenty-four hour, 365 days a year event. It was designed as a response to an acute event; the rest of the time we should be maintaining growth. Yet the world that we have chosen (the media, the government, et cetera) really encourages us to live in ongoing fear and it causes great debilitation of our physiological maintenance and the neurological and immunological characters that we express. It is important for us to understand that if we change our perceptions, we can change our biology and our world. We must stop living in fear because it is killing us as individuals and threatening our existence as a species.