The really weird story behind this book—the actual book

The book just exploded out of me.  As I said before, I really didn’t want to write it. But like I baby in its 10th month of gestation, the nagging voice inside of me became intolerable and needed to be let out.

And it was like giving birth to a two-headed baby with razors for nails and teeth.

Somewhere around October 1st, 2015, a thousand words just poured out of me. Then another and another. I hired an editor who was a author out of England. I would have friends read initial drafts and tell me that could not understand my wall of words. I would take it back to my editor for reworking. I would bring it back to my friends, and they still could not understand it.

As I was writing, I was reading hundreds of science papers on the most contemporary advances and thoughts on human stress and biology.  I had to use hot packs on my face, as the eyestrain was unbearable. My mother had always been a heavy reader, and she messed up her eyes as well by over-reading. I love to read, but the review of the scientific literature on the topic of stress literally started to make my mind become undone.

I have a small colonial style apartment in Cuenca’s downtown. I would not leave my apartment during my writing and research phase (though I had the sunlight coming in) until I had finished working and writing for the day.  This is a beautiful city, but when I would venture out, the world would be slightly twisted. My thoughts were a little undone, a little wonky. I was pushing myself to extreme mental fatigue, but it was like a cancer and it had to come out.

Because there are relatively so few physiologists around (all of the enthusiasm in science went for molecular biology for 50 years), the understanding of the near magical workings of human physiology has all be almost disappeared. This is a shame, because understanding the human requires basic understanding of the physiology….especially in medically-related professions…is desperately needed.

So, in many ways, understanding  of the deep, wacky, quantum mechanic-like mechanizations of the stress response sort has remained in stasis since Han Selye’s (the father of modern medicine) ideas from the 1950s and earlier.

Yes there has been many 10s of thousands of studies conducted and papers written. But a “unifying framework” remained elusive. The textbooks were dense, but inadequate. Many heroic researchers added tremendously to this field. But the problem was, there was no contemporary definition for “stress”….

So here it is:

Stress is the rate of adjustment it takes for an organism (including it’s organs and cells) to adapt to a particular environment. 

And this is accomplished by (usually) changing the shape of the body somehow to “fit” to the demand of the environment.  Again, I did not want to write the book, because just thinking about the reality of all of this is very mentally unraveling…..

So I was in this mental warp during the writing of this book. I would take very, very long hikes at very, very high altitudes to try to clear my mind. However, keeping a visual representation of this huge biological description in  my mind while writing was very, very wearing.  I was in another dimension almost this entire time. I skipped out on concerts and friends. This was a fetus in gestation, and I had to be very focused and take care of it.

 In all, I had 3 editors work the book over until a normal person could read it. All of them had emotional breakdowns while editing this book. I am sorry the book did this to them, but I think I understand why. They seemed to  mentally unravel while working with it like I did. Thanks so much guys—you did a great job.

I had 10 major edits altogether. I would read my writing, and it was if someone else had wrote it. I was just a vassal. I had 3 designers and 4 professional book marketing consultants help me. I wanted this book to be democratic and readable for everyone. I wanted my readers to understand and learn.

I designed twenty art covers, and had the folks over at Amazon Turk vote on what they wanted best. Same with the finished book cover….all democratically designed and selected.

Now for the title. I did not give a crap. For the longest time, the damn book didn’t have a name. I had a consultant brainstorm names for me, and then again had them voted on at Amazon Turk. So I didn’t even think of the title. This is probably why I keep forgetting it when people ask.

Maybe it was Ecuador. Maybe it was the ayahuasca. Maybe it was just me. Watching people in my culture die needlessly and be impoverished by preventable stress always kind of stuck in my craw. Twenty years in the making. Twenty years of trying to formulate the words for a dynamic process that everybody needs to know about. This is basic info, like CPR or first aid. Now that things are REALLY stressful (in this day and time of political and economic turbulence), we must determine how much of this is the cause of human beings just being worn out.

Think about it. It we weren’t so worn out, we might have had the energy to rid ourselves of corrupt leaders that cause us even more stress….

 

 

 

 

 

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