Feel the burn

Being 'stressed' is not cause for complaint, it's a sign our brains are working

Over the past 20 years the theory of "stress management" has achieved enormous power and prestige, and now permeates - virtually unchallenged - health policy in the UK. It presides over the GP's surgery, where "stress" is routinely scribbled on sick notes, and it underwrites workplace legislation, where employers can be prosecuted for failing to manage emotional unrest.

"Stress management" is based on the rather extraordinary idea that arousal, whether physiological or psychological, is harmful to health, and that the fight-or-flight response, a vital survival mechanism, was really designed to kill us. "Stress management" therefore sets out to prevent us from getting too aroused, agitated, tense, anxious, scared or angry. "Stress" practitioners seek to manage emotional life by means of psychological and chemical sedation - from benzodiazepines to relaxation exercises, massage, dolphin clicks and squeezy balls.

Even before I studied the so-called scientific evidence for all this, I found it fairly sinister. Years ago I was a Fulbright scholar in the arts, where emotions are explored and extolled. As Wordsworth put it: "Thanks to the human heart by which we live; / Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears. / To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." The arts are predicated on emotional arousal, and on climactic scenes and sounds in theatre, cinema, fiction and music that move us and ennoble us. What was the point, if humanity were meant to be perpetually calm? Did Van Gogh create his anguished masterpieces simply to relax us? Did Beethoven wrestle triumphant music out of his silent world because he wished to keep us quiet? I thought not.

I had also studied the psychology of sport and learned from interviewing many leading sportsmen that tension and fear - emotions currently described as "stressful" - played an important part in the enjoyment and performance of sport. Indeed, the whole fascination of competition between opponents of more or less equal technical ability lay in exploring the mental "edge" that divided winner from loser.

The final blow to my faith in stress management occurred when, as a University of East Anglia research fellow, I analysed hundreds of scientific papers on stress with scientists at the Centre for Environmental Risk. We found the term was borrowed from engineering in the 1930s by a Canadian-Viennese endocrinologist, Hans Selye, whose English was poor and who, in any case, confused the terms "stress" and "strain". Selye thought applying engineering terminology to hormonal secretions in rats - he experimented on 1,400 a day in his Montreal laboratory - might somehow reveal the secret of sickness. Because his distressed rats succumbed to disease, he assumed he had discovered the key to their suffering, and to human sickness and emotional pain as well.

Since then, the vague term "stress" has been loosely applied to any kind of distress or difficulty, to arousal in general and to anything that triggers it. Arousal and emotions have been turned into syndromes, and an industry with more members than our armed forces drip-feeds us alarmist medicalising twaddle known as "stress awareness" about our brains and bodies, the effect of which is to warn us, "Let us calm you down or you will die." The industry has little respect for human emotions, human consciousness or the human brain.

By a strange logic, taxing the body is seen as the key to physical fitness, whereas taxing or "straining" the brain is seen as the key to mental and physical illness. Some concessions are made for harmless pastimes such as sudoku and crosswords, and the elderly are warned not to let their brains idle completely. But otherwise the stress management message is clear: don't work the brain too hard or you will break it.

The normal adult brain weighs between 1,300 and 1,400 grams. Each of its 10bn neurons has a possibility of connections of one with 28 noughts after it. How one would go about exercising such a wonder of nature would depend largely on how it works. In the 1980s at the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico, a number of Nobel laureates put their heads together with other scientists in order to pry into the secrets of complex systems - self-organising structures that are common in nature, such as a tornado, a wasp swarm, a laser beam, a living cell - whose units exhibit seemingly "intelligent" transitions, spontaneously grouping themselves in an orderly way.

For example, heat up a pan of water. The water molecules, as they begin to warm, become more and more unstable and behave increasingly randomly, until suddenly, as though at the throwing of a switch, they organise themselves into a hexagonal convection pattern - and simmer. On the edge of apparent chaos they act coherently. The phenomenon is known as "emergence".

One complex system under study is the human brain. Scientists believe that the brain is also "emergent". Tension is inherent in neural activity. A pyramidical neuron, the style of cell found most commonly in the neocortex, looks like a tiny bare tree with fibrous branches and roots. In the moist electricity of the brain, the signalling system works like this: ions or charged particles go back and forth through pores in the brain cell membrane that can open and shut. But the cell membrane holds everything in check, with the pores closed, like a tiny dam, until it gets a signal to fire. Then the electrical potential suddenly switches from negative to positive as charged ions rush through the walls. The "action potential" moves in a wave along the nerve cable until it reaches the terminals, where it triggers the release of chemical transmitters that carry the message on to the rest of the network and other circuits.

The fight-or-flight response, in Dr Johnson's phrase, "concentrates the mind wonderfully". When we feel threatened, the heart speeds up and blood pressure increases. Blood supply to the digestive system and extremities is diverted to the large muscles, for fight or flight, and to the brain, which is about to boost its own power using oxygen and glucose. So while the blood vessels of the extremities and digestive system constrict, the blood vessels of the brain dilate, ready to receive its "rush of blood", and the vasodilation causes the nerve cables to stretch. This is part of the brain's minutely orchestrated system for controlling its own blood pressure - it can also constrict blood vessels when its supply is too low. Indeed, when we glibly refer to "pressure" situations and talk about "nervous tension" and "feeling the strain", we may be describing what our brains are doing at the time.

Suddenly, after a build-up of tension, there is an alchemical change. At a moment of high tension, the brain, fully charged, undergoes the phase transition of all complex systems: it orders itself. Tiny channels flick open in thousands of nerve cell walls, as millions of charged particles swarm through the locks and electrical potential switches suddenly from negative to positive. A surge of power links hundreds of networks, transmitting electricity across the galvanised, living brain. Millions, perhaps billions, of connections may be involved in the lightning power surge.

How might such dramatic cerebral events be mediated psychologically? Arguably, this is the moment when we get the buzz, the goosebumps, the relief and thrill of resolution; when we experience the wave of recognition, the making of connections, the out-of-body experience of concentration and focused thought, when everything becomes suddenly bright, brilliant and crystal clear. These are our breakthroughs, our brainwaves. Indeed, this may be the whole point of the "pressure" process. It might even be that the brain enjoys and needs emergence, and requires it to happen fairly often. And if that were so, then everything we mean by "stress" and all the unpleasant feelings of tension and pressure that we feel are part of a natural process. Stress management, because it calls for interruption of arousal and tension, may therefore disappoint and disable every cell in our heads.

There is too much evidence of a connection between emotional and intellectual "highs" and pressure situations to dismiss the theory of neural emergence out of hand. In near-death experiences, at the climax of pain and terror, subjects suddenly report feelings of beatific peace and calm. Artists and writers often make their magical fusions in the midst of personal crises. Some "psych themselves up" deliberately. Graham Greene achieved his purple passages by playing Russian roulette with his brother's revolver.

Even in an age of stress management, so-called "stressed" workers may devote their leisure hours to activities more or less guaranteed to produce tensions, tears and fears: potholing, skiing and hang-gliding, thrillers and chillers, horror movies, hunting, quizzes, sport, martial arts, white-knuckle rides, gambling, romance and sex. Even our highly protected children voluntarily engage in scary challenges and dares, "extreme" computer games and rites of passage. Why?

The conventional wisdom is that we are simply motivated by pleasure, but our leisure pursuits are much more complex than that. They facilitate an "adrenaline rush". They produce the cerebral climax (CC): an arousal curve, tension, climax and resolution. They give us our catharsis, our peak experiences, even the climactic revelations of religious faith. It should be emphasised here that CCs are not some minor version of, or substitute for, sexual climaxes. They are better than sex: many adventurers put their lives at risk to experience the CC. Indeed, sex is a version of what CCs are, because the body serves the brain, and in all its sub-systems recognises its master.

The need for cerebral climaxes may also explain self-destructive and antisocial acts, such as gambling all the housekeeping money, shoplifting for kicks and forbidden sexual encounters. The threat of almost getting caught, for some emotionally undernourished individuals, provides the tension loop. For most of us, though, the CC is obtained by taking part in leisure activities. The horror movie builds tension to a crisis of fright and gore until finally the terror is vanquished. The white-knuckle ride ratchets up fear and nausea to a climax after which riders clamber off the machinery thinking, "Phew - that was good." The horseracing commentary gallops along, rises to a frantic crescendo as frontrunners near the post, and then tails off as they saunter into the winners' enclosure. The more extreme the activity the higher the curve, but the pattern is the same.

Thrill-seekers are not trying to kill themselves. They inhabit the "edge" where danger is danced with and visions are seen. Sportspeople, in the pressure cooker of nerves and fear, suddenly have strange, celestial experiences they call "playing out of your skin". Television is increasingly given over to "reality" shows in which subjects are exposed to fear and tension. Quizzes are designed to produce a graduated tension arc with a climax and pay-offs.

The high points of our great works of art cause a climax or fusion in the mind. They provide a visceral experience, the tingle down the spine. They can take our breath away, and have a cathartic effect, coalescing and releasing confused or pent-up emotions and moving us to tears. Novelists explore their characters' mounting anguish to produce an epiphany.

And then there is the Mozart Effect. Scientists have begun to explore the benefits of classical music on mental health. Work at the University of California-Irvine showed that the brain-functioning of college students improved after listening to 10 minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. The Mozart group performed significantly better than those who listened to a relaxation tape. Music and mood manipulation have always gone hand in hand. Classical music in particular has been composed by geniuses over hundreds of years to invoke the cerebral climax. Its complex notations are a formula, exquisitely developed, for producing tension and pressure in sounds and sequences, climbing, falling, back and then climbing ever higher - to one cerebral climax after another. Listeners can hear and feel them.

Of course, cerebral climaxes should not be seen as another way of "managing stress". Nor do they represent a "quick fix" for human suffering, which is endemic to our condition. What they offer is a way of achieving emotional education and strength of character, a means of gradually discovering inner resources, and making sense of our experiences.

Such activities provide not just relaxation - the mantra of the stress management industry - but resolution, which is infinitely more satisfying.

· Angela Patmore is the author of The Truth About Stress, published by Atlantic Books at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p, go to www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875