Male’s Health in the Objective of Stressology – Beyond the Usual

From the structure the researchers came to the search for chemical compounds (neurochemical system of the brain) that cause and provide work of adaptation mechanisms. The research of Rita Levi-Montalchini (1909–2012), Italian neuroscientist and the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology and Medicine, led to the discovery of a number of nerve growth factors, one of which attracted attention of Mertsenih. It was a brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF- magic elixir of the brain. BDNF plays an important role in underpinning the changes occurring in the brain during a critical period. According to Mertsenih, it occurs in four different ways.

When we perform an action that requires the simultaneous activation of certain neurons, they secrete BDNF. This growth factor reinforces the connection between the neurons and helps to connect them together to ensure their co-activation in the future. BDNF also promotes the growth of a thin shell of fat around each neuron, which speeds up the transmission of electrical signals. During the sensitive (critical) period BDNF activates the basal nucleus – the part of our brain that allows us to focus attention and keeps it in the activated state throughout the critical period. N. Doydzh describes this process as follows. The basal nucleus helps us not only to focus attention, but also remember what we are experiencing, helps differentiation of the brain map. Here’s how Merzenich says about it: “It is like in our brain there is a teacher who says: “That is really important – you must know this to pass the exam called life”. Merzenich calls the basal nucleus and the attention system “modulating system of control of plasticity” – a neurochemical system that when activated, transfers the brain to the state of ultimate plasticity.

The fourth and final function of BDNF: it ends up strengthening key relationships – helping to complete the critical period. After establishing basic neural connections, need arises in the stability of the system and thus a lower level of plasticity. When BDNF is released in sufficient quantities, it disables the basal nucleus and completes the magical era of learning effortless. Subsequently, the basal nucleus can be activated only with emergence of something important, unusual or new or in the case when we make an effort to concentrate.

The idea that the brain like muscles can grow and be strengthened through trainings ceases to be a metaphor.

We live in an age of new technologies, speed and discoveries that lead to understanding the great importance of the human mind which makes it possible to control not only external physical processes, but also an opportunity of self-reconstruction underlying health (and illness) and longevity.

“Homo sapiens sapientis” is the specific name of the person – acquires a concrete content, which is not to be ignored. There are no pills for longevity; even changing his genome a person is doomed to illness and death in a relatively young age because his life is getting fuller of stress. Anthropogenic psychoemotional stress (APES) is a factor causing an invisible epidemic, about which at the beginning of the last century, psychiatrist Muller-Lier wrote: “… Our science has weighed and measured both the smallest and extremely large… while what is so strongly connected with our flesh and blood, what is closest to us and strongly affects our vital interests – human suffering and disasters – science has punished with complete disregard, blindly passed by them. The fact is so paradoxical that we must be amazed” (Mueller-Lier, F., 1935). While “stress – the child of the brain”, this quiet killer, often choosing the best, carried and carries away thousands of men, earlier than women.

The most striking, and probably the most powerful emotional force of Freud is a passionate love of truth, uncompromising faith in mind. The mind for him was that unique ability that could help solve the problem of human existence, or at least alleviate the suffering inherent in human life. The mind, as Freud felt, is our only instrument, or weapon with which we can get rid of illusions (religious shackles, according to Freud, are only one of them) and give meaning to life, to gain independence from the shackles of foreign power, and thus to install its own power on them. This faith in mind was the basis of his ceaseless quest for the truth – since in the complexity and diversity of the observed phenomena he opened a theoretical truth. Even if the results seemed absurd from the point of view of common sense, it did not bother Freud.. This belief in the power of mind proves that Freud was the son of the Enlightenment, the motto of which – “Sapere aude” (“Dare to know”) – fully identified both a person of Freud and his work.

EVOLUTION OF ADAPTATION AND
ITS SPECIFICITY IN HUMAN

The system of biological adaptation (SBA)

The system of psychosocial adaptation (SPA)

The system of biological adaptation (SBA). Adaptation – is the basic function of human life support, functioning and development. The mechanism of adaptation was discovered in the middle of the last century by H. Selye who named it “general adaptation syndrome” (GAS), which is an endocrine and humoral regulation of human psychophysiological state in response to changes in the environment. It is caused by a single mechanism, let’s call it “stressogenesis”, which is genetically programmed and passed from generation to generation.

This kind of adaptation is inherent in all living beings as a mechanism for implementation of self-preservation instinct and provided by a biological adaptation system (BAS). GAS can be considered an algorithm of the system which provides personality adaptation at the level of the body and actually performs adaptation of the body to the environment. According to Selye, it consists of two groups of effects: specific and non-specific psychosomatic effects.

This division is conventional, since the response symptoms is an interlacing of the non-specific with the specific. The non-specific stereotypical effects result from the activation of neural and humoral axes manifested through the GAS. According to H. Selye, stressogenesis is specific because of its psychosomatic response to the stressor which is a three-phase process: alarm reaction (A-R); stage of resistance – strain (S-R), and stage of exhaustion – asthenization (S-E). The body’s adaptation capabilities are limited, since it is all about the biological adaptation having quite rigid borders. It supports the first basic level of adapting a living organism to changing environment, that process being relatively passive: variation – alarm (first phase of GAS) – adaptation.

Example: A training session is under way. The audience is in a session situation, their attention, thinking and behavior are adequate to the situation. Besides getting situational information, the audience can also perceive background sensory stimulants having no adverse effects. Suddenly there is a clatter. All those present momentarily turn their heads towards the sound, half-rise, with a question on their face, bodies strained, eyes opened wide. This phase of alarm is estimating. In case the estimated situation suggests no threat, the stressor response is terminating at this phase and the audience laughing and joking (relaxation) return to the previous condition resuming training session. In case the situation is estimated as threatening (earthquake, hurricane, attack), everyone goes on the move, the behavior switches to rescue (“flight” or “fight”, according to Cannon).

The phase of alarm is realized automatically through the sympatho-parasympathetic neural axes. Anxiety is a bioelectric effect, so it is instant and unconscious. If the situation is threatening, the second phase of stressor reaction – phase of resistance or strain is developing. It is provided by endocrine-hormonal system which throws out stress hormones into the blood stream leading to effects in different organ-systems. This phase is multistep and multilevel. Each level is maintained by a successive introduction of hormonal axes: the adrenocortical, then the somatotropic and the latest – the thyroid. Stress hormones are associated with the concept of “adaptation energy” by Selye. Numerous investigations of biological adaptation have shown that a stressor reaction has an impulsive, intermittent nature, each time followed by relaxation. As a result, the third phase – the phase of asthenization develops. According to “adaptation energy” by Selye, long-time effect of any stressor will sooner or later inevitably result in losing the “adaptation force – energy”, or to its depletion. Adaptation energy always has a quantitative limit and each organism possesses a genetically inherited stock, expended through the lifetime, which can be considered as a component of individual stress resistance. This stock can be used rapidly or slowly. Depletion of adaptation stock of energy will result in ageing or death.

The model of stressor response includes the concept of “end organ” assuming any organ terminating the stressor response. “Anxiety made my head ache”; “The screaming boss made my colleague catch hold of his heart”; “The mere look of his body made me barf my guts”; “The mere recollection of my blunder makes me go into sweat and color”; “The mere voice of my mother-in-law makes me shake, I want to ruin everything…”, “My pressure is perhaps my daughter-in-law”.

These are examples of individual preference of an organ in a stressful situation, each person mostly having his own end stressor organ. The resulted somatic effects are a manifestation of activation of the SBA.

The system of psychosocial adaptation – SPA. Man is not merely a living organism: he has consciousness and speech, imagination and thinking. He has a unique ability to retain memories and re-live them again and again as if they were for the first time. Only man is able to endure a lot in the name of “something”, to wait and to hope for the future, while predicting its alternatives. Only man can develop the integrity of his life from the past, through the present, and into the future. Only man seeks meaning in everything: in objects, in physical phenomena, in facial expression, in words and deeds of other people. He is in a permanent whirlpool of physical life, in interaction with himself and his own kind. All this variety of factors and conditions places high demands on the system of adaptation and will naturally entail a need for improving and developing a new system of adaptation.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the biologically-oriented science has gradually initiated a psychological trend revealing the essence of man’s psychosocial adaptation using psycho-analysis founded by S. Freud. It was psychoanalysis that gave in-depth approaches, psychological insights to understanding what is happening in the psychic sphere, having discovered numerous mechanisms of psychological defense. According to Freud, after restoring the balance at the level of the body, man recovers his most complicated extra- and intrapsychic balance. The latter consists of the balance within a social environment with people, the balance of instinctive inclinations and the psycho-social instances that restrain them (vitally essential balance). Then man recovers the balances between the psychic instances themselves, balances of the synthetic functions of “Ego” itself as a specific adaptive apparatus of the individual. That is what comprises the system of psychological adaptation. Thus, man possesses two types of adaptation: the biological type responsible for adaptation of the body and psychological type which adapts personality. All intrapsychic processes are interrelated, dependent and interdependent by the biological adaptation system, but not only.

A metaphoric model of human adaptation.

SBA is the basis of adaptation depicted as “a dark column trunk” with three-phase branching because it has genetically programmed relatively rigid boundaries that limit the variability of adaptive possibilities. A variety of colored balls represents the SPA.

Psychosocial adaptation is flexible, dynamic; it has a large selection of freedoms due to psychological defense mechanisms, dissociation. SPA is multidimensional, it tends to develop; according to the emerging challenges becomes more complicated, separates from its basis, gives rise to derived forms that somehow remain dependent on the biological adaptation. One can consider the ever-expanding Universe of our adaptation, in proportion with the expanding spheres of life, communication, and with man’s perception of all things and his “Ego”. Moreover, human adaptation is distinguished by an active volitional conscious process that can get more complex with the change of the environment, with complication of arising assignments and their solutions, and stress-saturation. In the course of evolution, the stereotypes of reactions that arose once in a person based on instinctive reactions to stimuli (adaptation) were replaced by increasingly complex psychic acts. The latter in repetitive situations allowed to change the modes of response, thereby increasing the degrees of freedom of reaction. Therefore the adaptation of man with its active and passive components has to be clearly distinguished from accomodation. The latter is in fact a passive autoplastic process materialized through the system of biological adaptation with its basic mechanism – a three-phase stressogenesis, which restores the balance between the body and the environment as the first level of adaptation, as Freud (1931) and Alexander (1933) wrote in their time.

The GAS, being a psycho-physiological response to a changing environment at the very elementary level – anxiety phase is complex and caused by a unity of mental and physical in man. This phenomenon is already complicated as contains both a mental component – emotion (alarm) and a bodily one (variety of somatovegetational effects). Therefore understanding what is going on with man and in man is possible only through the prism of “correlations of the physiological and the mental, the biological and the social in the nature of man”. Actually we deal with the “intertransition” of the psychosocial into the biological and vice versa. This problem has long been under scientists’ close scrutiny, and its differing interpretations have long been a stage of fierce disputes. Some psychologists and biologists refer to this trend as “psychophysiological parallelism”. Thus, W. Wundt, a German psychologist, physiologist and philosopher, the founder of experimental psychology, as far back as 1874 in one of his most important works in the history of psychology, the book “Principles of Physiological Psychology” thought that physiological research was unable to penetrate into the mystery of the psyche because the psychic processes developed in parallel with the biological and were not determined by the latter. The complexity is primarily in both understanding the concept of the “psychic” and its inaccessibility to direct experiment, direct sensual observation. And a German physiologist E. Du Bois-Reymond in one of his lectures, “On the limits of science” – at the second session of the 45th Congress of German Natural Scientists and Physicians in 1873 suggested that the emergence of psychic phenomena was one of the seven fundamentally unsolvable mysteries of the world. Since then, much has changed.

Emergence of the principle of systemic activity of the nervous system, which replaced the previous three: the principle of reflex (R. Descartes, I. Sechenov, I. Pavlov), the principle of dominant (A. Ukhtomsky), the principle of reflection in understanding the brain activity, resulted in abandoning the notion of the role of the brain as an anatomical organ. For this purpose, it was necessary to abandon monocausalgia to interpret mental and behavioral paradigms. In view of polyetiology, psychic manifestations began to be treated as a consequence of exposure to more than one factor, rather to a sum of factors; and not simply a sum, but as a result of their specific interaction.

Gunthern von Hagens (2009), trying to embrace an individual in a holistic systemic concept on the one hand, describes different levels of the body – physiological, cognitive, emotional and transactional, and on the other hand, he can see man as part of the socio-cultural field. Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian biologist, known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST). It is an interdisciplinary practice, which describes systems with interacting components used in biology, cybernetics and other areas. Von Bertalanffy (1973) suggested a concept of hierarchal orders to describe the body of man, wherein the simpler systems (e.g. cells) were integrated into more complex systems (e.g. organs) as elements or subsystems. As to the organs, they were included as elements or subsystems in even more complicated systems, like organisms, which on the next hierarchical level again interacted with the environment forming social systems. This viewpoint brings into the foreground a thesis by V. Ehrenfels (1890) that the whole (in this case, it is a system) is more than the sum of its parts (subsystems). It is all about the Gestalt psychology. The idea of Gestalt has its roots in the theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ernst Mach. The concept of Gestalt was first introduced in contemporary philosophy and psychology by Christian von Ehrenfels in his famous work “Über Gestaltqualitäten (1890). With the increase in the complexity of the system, new qualities appear that have not yet existed at the level of the subsystem; psychosocial adaptation becomes such a quality.

I. M. Sechenov, A. A. Ukhtomsky, P. K. Anokhin, N. A. Bernstein, each from his own position, have made a weighty contribution into the development of living systems. As noted by Yu. Alexandrovsky, by virtue of systemic analysis, “…which is a specific logical and methodological instrument for studying different complex processes, it becomes possible to explain the mechanism of qualitatively new features of the whole (system)…” (2004).

In recent decades, physicists and mathematicians got involved in the study of human, his consciousness, being rather active and productive at that. The theory of information field has led to the creation of a holographic model of the Universe, each point of which contains all information. Psychologists have sounded the alarm about the growing amount of information, the information flow, in which a person lives. However, the human brain does not perceive, nor does it process the information around us. We do not perceive radio waves, TV waves; we do not hear ultrasound nor do we see infrared rays because of the stimulus barrier. According to L. Vygotsky, the psyche is a “sieve that filters the world”. But this process is not passive; the psyche “allows” that we receive exactly what we need “here and now”. It builds its structure on the basis of reflection, pleasure/displeasure, learns to select what corresponds to a person’s interests, value orientation, and only then passes to a new level of adaptation. This level is more complex since it is the basis for own reality in the process of exchange with the environment.

All open systems live by exchanging information and energy with the outside world. But this is not a random exchange, but rather a self-selection based on the principle of correspondence. The interaction occurs where compliance is found as the reason for the selective interaction of a person with the environment that seeks to find in the world “its own that has not yet become its own”. Where there is a correspondence, a meaning is born. So the sense reality is born – people live not in optical spaces, but in fields of meanings. When this “own, that has not yet become its own” finally becomes its own for the system in the course of its interaction with the outside world, it changes the structure of the system itself, complicating it. This complication occurs because each time the system receives from the outside not only what it “wanted” but also what it even “did not think of”. In other words, when a person receives something from the world, he becomes different. As a result, in the inner reality of meanings there is a harmonious fusion of what we consider to be “opposites” – “I” and “Not I”, the subject and the object, the inner and the outer. There is a multi-dimensional human world, containing both subjective and objective dimensions. This is the way of its development or rather self-development.

As Goethe said: – “Everything inside is long ago outside”. Thus a person changes the space by his subjectivity. This is a unified ability of any open complex system to “distort” the space around it in order to select again and again what most of all corresponds to it at present (I. Prigogine, 1986). “The path of man to himself lies through the world”, (V. Frankl, 1990). Indeed, we find ourselves in the world that is proportionate (corresponds) to us, but not in the world that is indifferent to us. A person meets in the world with himself – with his needs and opportunities. He is projected into this world, and from there he receives answers. But this is an active process on the part of man, since before that, having an affective sphere, the principle of pleasure/displeasure, he had built the architecture of his mental apparatus. And his brain through the lens of this apparatus filters the information field from the outside, sorting out the patterns of information corresponding to him – and in no way vice versa. But this process of filtration largely depends on the filter, or the sieve, which is used by this or that individual. And this is again a personal choice as a result of upbringing, imparted moral cultural traditions. If a person has not developed a core, he becomes an easy prey for catchers of human souls.

When he finds himself, the person occupies an active position. If this does not happen, he simply accommodates himself, but does not adapt. Actually he does not live and, according to V. E. Klochko, author of the theory of psychological systems, “a state may come when a person ceases to understand whether he lives his life, or whether his life lives”. That is, you have to be a subject, not an object of your own life. Moreover, life is not only a transition to the future, but also a transformation of its past. A person has always to reconstruct this experience of the past under new tasks. Experience includes, among other things, customs and rituals.

Gradually came the understanding that only a person has two sources of activity: not only needs, but also opportunities. Animals act mainly in the field of their needs. Human is given consciousness first of all to realize his potentials. At the beginning the concept of self-actualization was mentioned. In the light of new approaches, we are talking about self-realization, that is, first of all, about realization of the opportunities that are inherent in each person, transference of human potentials in potencies. Potentials are genetically incorporated programs. By itself the availability of potential does not guarantee that it will necessarily turn into reality. M. Mamardashvili (1997) writes that there is potential as an opportunity, and there is a potency that, unlike a simple possibility, “is an opportunity that simultaneously has the strength to realize it”. And self-development should be seen as a transition of opportunities into reality, and not only as a process conditioned by the satisfaction of basic needs. Behind creativity, for example, there is a “tense opportunity” for a person to create himself and the world.

The brain as the main constituent of the higher nervous activity (HNA) fulfills a systemic organization of all its components to form a systemic multi-level response adequate to its capabilities. This manifests its multi-functionality from the standpoint of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychopathology. The brain perceives information from the outside and from within; selects it with subsequent differentiated fixation, using the mechanisms of mirror neurons, eidetism, mechanisms of short-term, operational, long-term memory; chronicizes the effect of the stressor by the inclusion of a psychological mechanism – displacement; forms echo effects, creates flashbacks, dreams, somatic conversions; fills the sphere of the unconscious. This activity is provided by the mechanism of stressogenesis (there is no other) manifested by the GAS.

The first phase of the GAS is the phase of alarm – manifests itself as a non-specific symptom complex in the form of “neuroticism”. It has a bioelectric nature, and therefore a discontinuous (discrete) character; with a prolonged, lingering stress-situation a person enters the permanent stress zone, which is provided by the three-axis second phase of the GAS, which is neurohormonal in nature and manifests itself as psychosomatic symptoms, syndromes and diseases. The latter arise as a consequence of the transition of functional changes to structural in different organs and organ-systems. In the absence of psychotherapeutic and biotherapeutic assistance, permanent stress leads to the consumption of the hormonal limit, loss of some links of the GAS, which is fraught with the development of the third phase of the GAS – the phase of astenization revealed by the burnout syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, various asthenic and asthenic-vegetative states.

The structure of the adaptation model consists of two different levels:

1. The neurophysiological part includes: HNA with the brain in the center, sensorium, mirror neurons, the mechanism of eidetism, memory, endocrine glands, the conductor system, skin, organ systems, body.

2. The psychoanalytic part of the model includes: psychosensory reflection (sensations, feelings, pain), mechanisms of psychological defense, flashbacks, dreams, amnesias, conversions.

The inclusive concept by Hartmann (2002) regards the adaptation as a nonstop ongoing process that has its roots in the biological structure, with many of its manifestations reflecting the constant attempts of “Ego” to balance the internal or inter-systemic tension. According to A. R. Luria, if the initially developing mental activity has a relatively elementary basis while depending upon a “basal” function, it will subsequently become more complicated starting to be realized with involvement of the structurally higher forms of activity. Mental adaptation results from the activity of an open system which, according to L. Bertalanffy is characterized by “a state of mobile equilibrium” in which its structure remains constant. But in contrast to an ordinary equilibrium, this constancy persists in the process of continuous motion of its constituent substance. The mobile equilibrium of open systems is characterized by the principle of equiphility, that is an open system can be preserved and develop not depending on the initial conditions. At the same time, the author emphasizes, “the living systems can be defined as hierarchically organized open systems that preserve themselves or develop in the direction of achieving the state of mobile equilibrium” (L. Bertalanffy, 1969).

The main distinction of psychological adaptation from the biological is in that the latter provides the adaptation of man to the environment, i.e. has the function of an adaptive character when the environment is primary and determines the sphere and the range of man’s activity and behavior. Figuratively we can imagine that man and environment roll along the road of life in the same harness wherein environment is the “wheel horse”. This adaptation assumes a reasonable conformity with regard to the outside realities, therefore in many cases it also includes activities aimed at modifying the environment or its adequate control. It is this process that initiates and triggers the psychological adaptation enabling man to change the environment adapting it to his needs, demands and purposes. And so, already not two horses, but three: “Environment, Man and his Intellect” are tearing along the road of life, among which the anchor is variable.

As a separate, third form of adaptation appears the choice of a new environment, where alloplastic and autoplastic changes are combined. Human as a carrier of consciousness has one more form of adaptation including both the first and the second kinds, but containing a qualitatively new purpose, namely, the search for and choice of a “new” – “the new environment”, which is favorable for human functioning. This constant search for “the new” is very meaningful in human life and adaptation. It is implemented by the functional subsystem of perception and information processing, the so-called “information subsystem” consisting of a number of leading links. One of those is a link providing search and information processing, its storage and usage. For a full-scale work of this subsystem it is necessary that the information items contain elements of novelty and be somewhat indeterminate. It is the presence and search for novelty in information flows that are developed in males but not due to genetic peculiarities of their brain structure but as a consequence of the developing psychosocial adaptation in the world full of stresses.

The activity of this subsystem functioning is directly proportional to the state of the environment in which a person lives at every particular moment in his life. The more crisis-prone the environment, the less active is the search for novelty in information, but the greater the need for experience to overcome the complexities of this environment.

Another important principle of adaptation, according to Hartmann, is change of function. To estimate the adaptive significance of a particular behavior, it is necessary to distinguish the currently existing function of this behavior from the one that existed originally. Behavioral functions often change in the process of adaptation, and, ultimately, behavior can serve a purpose different from the original. The knowledge that functions change helps to avoid the so-called “genetic error”, a simplified assumption that an individual’s current behavior is a direct outcome of the past. This point of view confirms the role of the social environment in changing the genetically engineered program, i.e. “A man himself is able to choose some part of his fate and adjust it himself”. Change in the environment and change in the functions provide the flexibility of mental adaptation, without which a productive full-fledged life is impossible.