I can’t talk about it now, I’m too stressed out. Dealing with day-to-day events that cause stress can produce such symptoms as headaches, shortened tempers, and even silence. If the stress is long-term, the physiological changes can be extensive. The physical and mental distress, for example, of victims of post-traumatic stress disorder can range from flashbacks to episodes of violent behavior to a lessening of verbal skills and short-term memory. While many of the events we think of as stress-producing are the result of human-human interaction, so-called natural stresses such as heat or cold also trigger a variety of symptoms, or responses in living organisms.
1
Two such responses are the wilting of plants and sleeping in animals or, on a technical level, decreased turgor and increased torpor. Turgor comes from Latin turgere, “to be swollen.” It describes the normal fullness or tension produced by the fluid present in plant or animal cells or by blood in the body’s vessels and capillaries. When, for example, a plant is stressed by drought, the fluids held in specialized cellular structures called vacuoles diminish, lessening the pressure that the internal contents of the cell place on the cell wall. Less pressure, less opportunity to stay rigid. The cell walls buckle and the plant wilts. In contrast to this concept of pressure or tension, torpor, from Latin torpere, “to be stiff,” is a metabolic response exhibited by some mammals. It describes a temporary physiological state in which an organism’s body temperature drops and its metabolic rate is reduced. Thus, an animal is said to be in a state of torpor when it hibernates to avoid the stresses of cold and, perhaps, food shortages or when it estivates to avoid excessive heat or drought.
