Stress is bad for you. Doctors, masseuses and dudes trying to get you to take quaaludes tell you that all the time. But the common answer to why this is has never made that much sense to me.

Basically, scientists say that when you’re stressed out, this primal part of you ignites a “fight or flight” response, releasing all this cortisol and adrenaline that gives you high blood pressure and messes up your tissues. This seems like half an answer, like if I asked you who the Beatles were and you said John and Paul. But where is that drumming coming from? (This example would also work if I replaced “Beatles” with “New Testament Writers.”)

Coming from a family with a history of neurosis and schizophrenia (fairly old school psychoses), I got interested in Freud in college, and it was there that I started to think about just what stress was in a different way. A lot of the patients that visited Freud were women, and a lot of them had what was then called hysteria, which translates literally to “wandering womb.” You can see why the disease and term have fallen out of favor. But the basic premise of hysteria, much of the time, was that a woman felt immense anxiety, pressure and sadness but did not feel that it was appropriate to exhibit symptoms of unhappiness, and bottled them up. The funny thing was, their symptoms would often manifest as a physical illness. They were too proud to ask for help so their bodies found an alternative method of getting them special attention – torturing them with physical illness. Women would come to Freud with never-ending coughs and he would find that they weren’t sick, they just really needed to be paid attention to, to be listened to.

Old-school hysteria was a communication issue – their bodies were communicating to outside forces that these women needed help. (A current example might be a troubled woman funneling her anxiety into an eating disorder, a visible deterioration that makes people worry but doesn’t presume anything specific about her mental state.) Stress is a bit different.

Basically, I think sickness related to stress is your body giving you an acceptable way to get out of the stressful thing that you don’t want to do. Stressed about prom to the point where you can’t deal? Here’s a migraine. Now you can stay home. It’s not acceptable to skip prom because you’re nervous, but it is if you’re so ill you can’t open your eyes.

In a sense, stress-related sickness dares you to just quit the stressful stuff you’re doing. The problem is, people don’t listen; they ignore their symptoms and keep going, essentially one-upping their body’s dare by saying, “You’re making me sick so I can take a step back. But it’s not working. You’re going to have to make me sicker.” It creates a cycle that can actually lead to deterioration over time.

A great example of this hypothesis comes from the book, “Fruit,” by Brian Francis. After the narrator’s mom falls off a porch and breaks her leg, his older sister freaks him out by insisting that their mother’s subconscious made her fall because she didn’t want continue being a Mary Kay sales rep. While that’s an extreme example, it’s a funny way to understand the idea.

This way of looking at stress counters the idea that it’s a pointless leftover from the days when we were running away from grizzly bears and hitting our enemies with caveman mallets. I tend to think the “this pervasive problem exists because we have all these leftover neanderthal instincts that don’t make sense in a world of Splenda and X-Box” argument is pretty weak in general. Most parts of our psychology that have stuck around for this long have stood the test of time because they do have a function. In fact, the idea that we are unable to express our anxiety about a situation to the point where we make ourselves sick actually seems hyper-modern, showing how complex, proud and interested in saving face we have become.

– Becky Lang