Stress

What is Stress?

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Anything that poses a challenge or a threat to our well-being is a stress. When you sense danger—whether it’s real or imagined—the body’s defenses automatically kicks into what is known as the “fight-or-flight” reaction, or the stress response.

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When you feel threatened, your nervous system responds by releasing a flood of stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, which fires up the body and prepares it for emergency action. Your heart rate quickens, your blood pressure rises, the breath quickens, your muscles tense – ready for action. Your senses become sharper. You are poised ready to either fight or flee from the danger at hand.

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The stress response is the body’s way of protecting you. In emergency situations, the stress response can save your life—giving you extra speed to run away from a threat, or the quick reaction time to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.

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Everyone feels stress from time to time. There are lots of different types of stress – ranging from pressures from work, family, school, and responsibilities, sudden life changes such as losing a loved one, a divorce, losing a job, or traumatic events such as natural disasters, major accidents.

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Stress isn’t always bad. Stress can help you perform under pressure and motivate you to strive toward a goal. There are types of stress that promote emotional and physical well being. Physical exercise is a great example of a kind of good stress. Engaging in physical activity such as walking, running, or yoga places a degree of stress on the body which then allows the muscles to develop, bones to become stronger and the heart and lungs to become more efficient. The stress of exercise also causes your brain to release “feel good” endorphins and neurotransmitters.

If you frequently experience stress—as many of us do with the pressures of our culture these days – your body may be in state of stress most of the time. This can lead to serious health problems.

 

The American Institute of Stress notes that 75-90% of visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related complaints.

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Chronic stress affects nearly every system in your body. It can suppress your immune system, upset your digestive and reproductive systems, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, cause physical pain such as headaches, and speed up the aging process. It can even rewire the brain, leaving you more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

Chronic stress depletes our bodies of precious resources needed for our health and vitality.

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The most dangerous thing about stress is how easily it can creep up on you. Remember the analogy of the frog in a pot of water? You get used to it. It starts to feels familiar even normal. You might not notice how much it’s affecting you. It becomes easy to make excuses for how you might be feeling or suffering. We slowly adapt to circumstances and before we know it, we are yelling at someone we care about or getting sick, or have chronic pains, headaches, we are grinding our teeth at night or developing syndromes such as IBS or an autoimmune disease or we have a gnawing feeling of overwhelm and angst constantly living in the background.

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Everyone responds to stress differently. How you respond to stress is based on the type of stress, your personality, your body constitution, your conditioning, how long the stress has been going on, what skills you have to deal with the stress and what kind of support system you have around you.