Vägen/Artikel - The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease

Artikeln in question (tl;dr at bottom av detta inlägg) ställer intressanta frågor, och jag själv är övertygad om att vi i dom kommande åren kommer fokusera mer på den neurologiska aspekten av utbrändhet, depression, och det vi förstår som "mental ohälsa" överlag. Det finns ju redan lite studier vars ingång varit att undersöka huruvida man kan behandla depression om man riktar in sig på det immunologiska istället för säg KoBeTea the shit out of ens tankemönster - and the results are promising. Also: PTSD som något vi kan förstå som mycket mer brett än det krigsoffer/förövare upplever - preach it! Med större potential för komplexitet vad gäller samhällsstrukturer, tankemönster, och emotionell kapacitet, kommer faktiskt även en annan sorts känslighet som upplevs vara löjlig enbart utifrån dom gamla paradigm där den nya komplexitetens patologier förminskas the age old ways; "kids these days"; "back in my day, I had to..." - osv.
 

Look, the world you grew up in was different, you're wired a different way, så hold off on the judgment, thank you very much - you grumpy rhetoric strawman man you som Weird Al Yankovic förkroppsligar i When I Was Your Age.
 

Anyways - here's a tl;dr av artikeln ifråga:

The same parts of the brain that control the stress response … play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. And since it is these parts of the brain that also play a role in depression, we can begin to understand why it is that many patients with inflammatory diseases may also experience depression at different times in their lives… Rather than seeing the psyche as the source of such illnesses, we are discovering that while feelings don’t directly cause or cure disease, the biological mechanisms underlying them may cause or contribute to disease. Thus, many of the nerve pathways and molecules underlying both psychological responses and inflammatory disease are the same, making predisposition to one set of illnesses likely to go along with predisposition to the other. The questions need to be rephrased, therefore, to ask which of the many components that work together to create emotions also affect that other constellation of biological events, immune responses, which come together to fight or to cause disease. Rather than asking if depressing thoughts can cause an illness of the body, we need to ask what the molecules and nerve pathways are that cause depressing thoughts. And then we need to ask whether these affect the cells and molecules that cause disease.
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Since cortisol shuts down immune cells’ responses, shifting them to a muted form, less able to react to foreign triggers, in the context of continued stress we are less able to defend and fight when faced with new invaders. And so, if you are exposed to, say, a flu or common cold virus when you are chronically stressed out, your immune system is less able to react and you become more susceptible to that infection.
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Stress need not be on the order of war, rape, or the Holocaust to trigger at least some elements of PTSD. Common stresses that we all experience can trigger the emotional memory of a stressful circumstance — and all its accompanying physiological responses. Prolonged stress — such as divorce, a hostile workplace, the end of a relationship, or the death of a loved one — can all trigger elements of PTSD.