What is a stress-related illness? And how does resilience protect us? Most of us are quite resilient against many of life’s stressors for most of our lifespans. So how does something as psychological as loneliness shorten our lives? And how does depression double the risk for death by heart disease? Some of the answers are found in the secrets to healthy aging. Just ask the centenarians.

How fast or slow does the process of dysregulating the stress response system go before a disease emerges? This chapter builds a model for how this process works over the lifespan. The apparently sudden onset of diabetes or heart disease in our fifties or sixties can often be traced to dysregulations that began years or decades before, invisible to the unsuspecting and asymptomatic. Toxic stress accelerates illness and speeds up aging. How do we know if we’re on a fast track to future illness and early death? And when is the best time to intervene? That depends on how we measure stress. Consider Teresa Langford’s pathways from genes to stress to illness over 53 years.

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.

How big a problem is toxic stress in our own culture and around the world? Any way we measure it, toxic stress is a problem for about one in five of us. Most of us don’t know if we’re at risk for stress-related illnesses. And measurement is not easy, as Ted Daley’s experience shows us, pointing to one reason we overlook toxic stress. Teresa Langford’s story weaves throughout this book to show how toxic stress has erupted at key points in her life, suggesting lessons for the rest of us.