1

Comment

The one undeniable aspect of life is that stress, in one form or another, is always going to be present in our lives. The keys are the management of our stressors, dealing with it and using the appropriate control. We must be able to manage both our physiological but also our psychological responses.
In regards to this there are some very exciting bodies of work that are currently being conducted.

Things that will help provide an intervention in extreme situations, such as 9-11 and others. This is called CISD or critical incident stress debriefing. The goal is to discuss the event that has happened ASAP after the event itself has transpired. The possibilities are endless and the positive aspects of CISD are that it can lessen our pathological reaction to stress and can go a long way towards preventing the onset of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in its very worst of manifestations.

The hope would be that the CISD concepts would be able to be translated not to just lessening the effects of traumatic events but also to the normal types of stress that we encounter in our daily lives through the onset of helpful strategies.

Because of our genetic makeup the stress responses are very individualized. Another possibility on the horizon is that we might be able to alter our genes. There are already pre-natal tests that can show the likelihood of diseases, abnormalities etc… in the future child so the hope of the future would be that maybe we could genetically determine the over/under of stress reactors. To be able to turn on or off certain genes is an exciting future possibility for the areas of health and stress.