Stress: How does it work and what are its effects a the cellular level and on the general well-being

The number of things that can reduce the life span of an African is depressing: HIV, TB, Malaria famine, war and (unfortunately) etc. The continent’s situation seems at many times over our control. Countries are trying to solve their internal problems, keep up with globalization and the international expectations of better education, health care, and governance. With all the very urgent things to care about certain problems in our lives are left to wait for our upcoming development (dangerously slow though). Those problems, for instance rising stress level, can actually become another factor to reduce our life span even more.

A high number of people with high level of stress is usually correlated to development. In other words more of the most stressed people are found in developed countries. But here, statistics could also be interpreted as developed countries have more people that can pay for a consultation and get diagnosed with high stress level. The same reasons that reduce the life span of the average African could also cause him an expected high stress level. But that is not seen, and by “not seen” I mean not diagnosed, and by “not diagnosed” I mean that there is too little interest on the continent for such issue. However, that won’t take away the real problem that stress is becoming.

Stress has many other affects that go beyond panic attacks over overlapping tests. Stress has been in fact positively correlated to cancer, age related diseases such as Parkinson, weakened immune systems and depression. For these reasons, I think it’s very important that we get the right information about stress and perhaps consider it as an opportunity for research.

Thus, I chose to focus my scientific research journey to understanding how exactly stress works and what its effects are at the cellular level and general well-being. Hopefully I can bring some awareness and interest on the topic!

The Bigger Picture

It is easy to tell what is going wrong in our communities, and complain about it. It takes a few members of the community who not only spots the problem, but tries to understand it and find its real root, and proposes a solution to it.

Many people in our countries have probably noticed certain issues that are becoming alarming. But how many of them have actually tried to seek for the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of these phenomena? What is preventing them from doing so?

I like to think that ALA has equipped me with the right mindset not to limit my understanding of issues to assumptions. The education I am receiving here is not only providing me with the right tools to approach a problem, it is also inspiring me to always look to the bigger picture. Here, I have learnt to discover what I believe to be my purpose, what I am passionate about and how to go for my dreams. All of those are rooted into giving back to my community and working towards its development.

One of the problems I think deserves some attention today in Africa is certainly stress. A great majority of our societies are not individualistic. The group decides for the individual and problems such as stress are not recognized as real problems. The word ‘stress’ does not exist in many tribal languages in Senegal for instance. And as development and globalization are now surely reaching Africa, the stress level of people is expected to rise for many different reasons. This phenomenon is definitely one thing I am decided to look at in my Scientific Research journey, and beyond.

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Human beings are philosophical animals. As human beings, inquiry is the foundations of any knowledge we pursue. We wonder, ask questions and the mere fact of trying to answer them brings us innovation. And we wonder more and ask more questions to finally find that we might not even be doing it enough.

During my journey into the ‘Scientific American’ wonderland, I discovered that there was so much to know and so much yet to be discovered. So many questions arose from my readings and it’s my great pleasure to share it today (we’ll go for a bullet point format, shall we?)

·       -  How does the human brain works? I mean REALLY! How do we explain emotions, free will, crime and abuse?

·       -  How do we fairly determine intelligence? Are IQ and EQ enough to do so? What do they even REALLY tell?

·        -  Should we condemn a sociopath because he was born with a tendency to hurt? Isn’t that just another disability?

·         -Why do we yawn and how is it contagious?

·        -  What makes human beings always go for the irrational decision in Game theory’s models?

To conclude I want to stress that our generation should feel extremely lucky. Knowledge has basically been offered to us. In the past, if someone had a question, it was up to that person to get answers. Today we can just type in our Google search boxes ‘apple’ and not only would we get several definitions of the word, but we’d even get  the symbolism behind it and recipes with it!

Let’s all embrace being part of the ‘microwave generation: everything here and now!’