Stress comes in molecule form. I took chemistry in college, several iterations of it in fact, and I remember exactly none of it. But I certainly would have remembered if they’d shown me the chemical composition of a stress molecule. "Here is butane, there is acetic acid, and if you’ll notice to my left, this is stress." They may not have covered stress in college chemistry, but they sure generated a lot of it.

Stress is a reasonably stable molecule. Once you metabolize some of it, it takes a while to dissolve. It’s like spent uranium, in fact, with residual radiation hanging around for a good long time. Stress molecules run around wreaking havoc if left unchecked.

Fortunately for me—and for pretty much all Slowtwitch readers—stress can be burned. It doesn’t generate anything useful—it doesn’t break an actin-myosin bond, or buffer acidity—but it does give off a satisfying little pop when incinerated. Running is the quickest way to burn stress. You can feel those molecules popping like popcorn—or flaming out with a bang, like a mosquito landing on a bug zapper—when out for a five-miler. Cycling burns stress, too, but stress burns best in a white-hot fire, and running is best for getting the temperature up.

There is one other way I’ve found to get stress molecules out of my body. This takes some explanation, and also a little show-and-tell. So I’ve added a graphic to the left: a picture of one of our dogs. We have six altogether—four greyhounds we adopted and a couple of lab-types. The one you see here is Cruz. He’s the oldest of the lot, just celebrating his eleventh.

Cruz is aptly named—he cruises through life. He loves people, can take or leave other dogs, and does not run crazed, hell-bent-for-leather like the younger ones. On his "runs" he ambles from one flower to the next, taking in a deep draught of each. He is the proverbial one who stops to smell the roses. In his latest book, "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates," Tom Robbins writes of an old tropical bird that only utters one phrase: "People of zee wurl, relax." This bird might have been an ornithological model of Cruz.

He has the run of the house and the yard. But he spends most of his day in the office with me, flipped over on his back, as he is pictured here, mouth open, tongue lolling, perfectly balanced on the crest of his spine, dead asleep.

So after a couple hours of writing, taking phone calls, thinking about what I expected to get done today that I haven’t even started by mid-afternoon, I realize I’ve been steadily generating stress molecules. Then I notice Cruz behind me, sleeping it off in his dead-bug pose. I get up out of my chair, go over and kneel down, and give him a hug. He wakes up and starts licking me.

This generates Cruz molecules, and these in turn hunt and eat stress molecules, Pac Man-style. They didn’t give me the formula for the Cruz molecule either, which makes me wonder what the hell organic chemistry was good for anyway.