Your stress response system determines every day whether you thrive or die. Yet how well do you or your doctor know how this orchestra of organs works? It’s effortless when we’re healthy and a mysterious struggle when we’re sick. What is good, tolerable, or toxic stress for you may be different for me. Why is toxic stress such a blind spot for modern medicine? This chapter raises the key questions addressed by this book and points to some of the answers.

This chapter introduces our stress response system and how it works in the sprints of life. Under the best of circumstances and when we are in the pink of health, our stress response system functions like a finely conducted orchestra, and we hardly notice what a marvel of orchestration we live by. Herbert Benson’s studies in the 1970’s of the physiology of transcendental meditation paved the way for the Mind Body Institute and others to practice approaches retraining dysregulated stress responses. A discussion of the distinguishing features of our stress response system leads the concept of allostasis or the cumulative burden of stressors across a lifetime—a measure of the wear and tear of life.

We follow Teresa Langford in her efforts to navigate the treatment options she faced with her multiple illnesses. Through barriers and breakthroughs she found a way to retrain her stress response system and achieve a sense of resilience for a renewed life as a partner and parent and teacher. This chapter discusses the range of approaches that have shown promise for improving the treatment of stress-related conditions, closing with some lessons learned about the challenges of retraining our dysregulated stress response systems.

To turn the general ideas of the previous chapter into specifics, this chapter takes a fanciful look at the hidden symphony to see what happens in Usain Bolt’s stress response system during his ten-second sprint as the world’s fastest human. He is one of the master conductors of the stress response system, with his speed as proof of his prowess. An appreciation of the orchestration required to mount this everyday miracle provides the background for understanding the way persistent and severe stressors disturb this process. The anatomy of six major organs in the stress response system is described and depicted.

This chapter collects the tips on what we as individuals can do to better manage toxic stress and to reduce the contributions of stress to acute and chronic illnesses. Because toxic stress is such a common problem and a potent contributor to our most costly conditions all around the world, but still poorly understood, we should elevate toxic stress to a top public health priority to guide our efforts to find the most effective ways to prevent and treat stress-related conditions.