What, Me Worry? Stress and MS

To say I’ve always been a worrier would be an understatement.  At the age of eight I stayed awake nights convinced that I’d developed leprosy since the bedroom light had been turned out (thank you, Ben Hur).  Since then my worrying has centered mostly on my health and the health of my family and friends.  This hasn’t been an idle, generalized concern.  It has bordered on the obsessive, the compulsive, the disordered.  Not surprisingly, the worry itself has taken a toll on my health.  I’ve also written about how my early home life caused me to become hypervigilant about any real or perceived threat.

I firmly believe this obsessive worry and hypervigilance, along with other factors I’ve touched on in a previous blog, contributed to the development of my MS.   My intuitive conviction is increasingly supported by research in the fields of psychoneuroimmunology and psychology, which largely recognize the connection between stress early on in life and “hyperresponse to stressors later in life” and the consequences of that lifetime dynamic. 

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