The death of a spouse is a very big stressor. Stressors are events perceived as threatening or challenging. A loss of life is really an emotional and psychological stressor. According to studies person experiencing severe stress have greater risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lung disease. According to U.S. National Academy of Science, people recently widowed, fired, or divorced are more vulnerable to disease. Another point that was made was a Finnish study of 96,000 widowed people who confirmed the phenomenon that their risk of death doubled in the week following their partner’s death.
Important life changes are especially stressful when we appraise them both negative and uncontrolled. Perceiving a loss of control also causes us to be more vulnerable to ill health because it provokes an outpouring of stress hormones. A biological effect that may contribute to this effect is general adaptation syndrome (GAS). GAS is Selye’s concept of the body’s adaptive response to stress in three stages- alarm, resistance and exhaustion. The alarm reaction would be the death of the spouse which may cause your blood to divert to your skeletal muscles and feel some shock. The resistance would be increase in temperature, blood pressure and respiration. And finally the exhaustion would be the leading cause to the vulnerability to illness. In extreme cases this may cause you to collapse or die.
Another biological effect is the observation by Walter Cannon. Cannon observed that extreme cold and emotion-arousing incidents trigger an outpouring of adrenaline noradrenaline. These two stress hormones enter the blood stream from the sympathetic nerve ending in the inner part of the adrenal glands. When alerted by brain pathways, the sympathetic nervous system increases heart rate and respiration, diverts blood from digestion to the skeletal muscles, dulls pain, and releases sugar and fat from the body’s stores- all to prepare the body for fight or flight.
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