Our capacity to adapt to stress differs between individuals. This almost always goes back to childhood and relates to how well grounded we were and how valued we felt growing up.
A well-adjusted child is comfortable expressing emotions in an appropriate way. She has learnt to stand her ground and set her boundaries. She has some fundamental values to guide her. And she has probably grown up in a loving environment, has no attachment issues and relatively few health issues. She is far better equipped to deal with external stressors when they arise. (Unfortunately, this nirvana is rarer than we realise.)
If a child experiences fear or loss, is denied nurturing and affirmation, or is emotionally repressed, or abused, then they will adapt coping strategies or personality traits that help them minimise pain and avoid conflict. These are usually brought into their adult life.
These strategies and traits may no longer serve them that well as adults, but are by that stage so ingrained as to appear to them as the most normal response. Furthermore, these ingrained habits may actually cause them increased stress. A child that is fearful of conflict may manifest a high resting state of anxiety as an adult. If he was denied affirmation he may manifest a constant need to please others, ahead of his own needs later in life. Or maybe he has learnt that raging tantrums and aggressive behaviour is the way to get what he wants.
Someone who is relentlessly positive, to the exclusion of everything negative, may deny or ignore her warning signs that something is wrong. One study of breast cancer patients showed that the relentlessly positive group was at the highest risk of being dead one year later. Dr Michael Kerr said “Compulsive optimism is one of the ways we bind our anxiety to avoid confronting it.”
These ingrained traits are not just a psychological response. When the organism feels under attack then at a cellular level it will also adapt, repressing growth, and retreating into a defensive mode. This history is literally ingrained in the biology of the organism, including in the bone structure. Those old tensions experienced as a child or young adult, are still reflected in their bone structure many years later.
“The cell’s fate is ‘controlled’ by its interaction with the environment and not by a self-contained genetic program,” - Dr Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief.
At any moment we can be under stress attack from current external factors, as well as the from the past where stress has become internalised. We’re constantly re-stressing ourselves through our habitual behaviour patterns that we acquired early in life, from old stressors. The patterns are ingrained psychologically and physically where they sub-consciously remind us how to react. Not only do our habitual responses no longer serve us, but they can be outright threats to our health.
Some people may think they can get away without addressing these issues if they’re not currently sick. Except that denying the problem doesn’t make it go away, it only increases the likelihood that they’ll ignore the warning signs until the body forces them to stop. Then once they are sick, they suddenly have a whole lot more stress to deal with, not only for themselves, but for everyone close that is impacted.