Stressed: Be Aware Of Its Physiological Impact

How Being Stressed Affects Your Health

We are all familiar with the typical stressed out feeling with a pounding head and tensed muscles. These reactions are meant to do good to you and are aimed towards preparing your body for a potential attack or damage. However, when feeling stressed becomes a chronic condition, the effects of the same can have lasting implications on your body.

What is Stress?

When stressed, our body typically gets ready for a probable attack. Experiencing an on-going stressed state is known to be one of the leading causes of most illnesses that affect us. When stressed, our body is going through a response that can be broadly divided into three main stages, which are as follows –

Alarm Stage

Whenever your body is under threat, it sets the body alarm on. This triggers the release of the stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones increase the strength of your body and induce physiological symptoms like faster heart rate and increased blow flow to all body parts. In a way, your body is preparing to take quick action against any unforeseen attack. Although this flight-or-fight mode can save your life, it can also affect your body negatively.

Resistance Stage

Once the initial phase is over, the body tries to adapt itself to the situation, causing you to feel stressed, but at the same time, the process of restoring your normal body functioning also begins at this rate.

Exhaustion Stage

Stressed response eats up a large amount of the body’s resources. As a result, the body gets exhausted and becomes vulnerable to infections, diseases or any form of harm.

This response may be generated in reaction to both physical and emotional forms of attack. The response generated by every individual is different and depends on past experiences and his/her ability to cope with the anticipated threat.

Sympathetic and Parasympathetic System: How Are They Involved With Stressed Feelings

There are two main components of the autonomous nervous system, namely the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The autonomous nervous system, as the name suggests, works autonomously and is responsible for the bodily functions that occur unconsciously. These functions include breathing, digestion and circulation, in addition to several others.

The PNS and ANS are responsible for preparing and maintaining normal body functioning in stressful conditions. Although they work in an independent manner, they work together for the common purpose. The SNS is responsible for generating fight-or-flight response of the body under stressful conditions. However, the PNS stimulate activities like rest-and-digest when the body is in a state of rest.

How Being Stressed Affect Your Physiology?

Being stressed is known to affect the body in its entirety. The two systems, which are most affected, are digestive and heart. As mentioned previously, any stress response triggers the release of stress hormones. These hormones interfere with the release of acids in the stomach and colon activity. As a result, it may cause pain in the stomach and diarrhoea.

The stress hormone, cortisol, increases the heart rate and blood pressure of the body. Besides this, it is also known to elevate cholesterol levels. These effects make the body vulnerable to strokes and heart attacks.

At the same time, being stressed also has effects on the immune system and mental health. Prolonged stressed levels may also cause a significant increase in weight as cortisol increases the body’s cravings for food.

Being stressed can pretty much have an impact on any other area of our body.

In 1970, Dr John Sarno, Professor at the New York University School of Medicine, first discovered that back pain symptoms could have an emotional cause. This condition is called tension myositis syndrome (TMS). According to Dr Sarno, TMS does not respond to normal back treatments and keeps coming back because the underlying causes are repressed emotions causing the person to be feeling stressed out.

How to Manage Being Stressed

The key is to become aware of our emotions, learn how to handle them and recognize them for what they are – it’s a biased perception of our reality influenced by our personal experiences, priorities, values, traumas and life events.

 Balancing your perception could impact your physiology and your health in a way you had never thought it possible by diminishing stressed feelings and reactions.

How Can You Stop Being Stressed?

First, stop wasting time and energy putting yourself down for something you can’t help doing or feeling.

Becoming aware of your beliefs and how they are the foundation of the scenario running your life that causes you to feel stressed.

Being gentle with yourself. The webs we create around ourselves need to be unwound. We need to gently unravel the knots to go to the root cause.

Having the willingness to let go. According to our particular perception and set of thought patterns, we expect and “need” to have certain outer experiences. Every outer effect – symptom –is the expression of an inner thought pattern. To battle only the outer effect is a wasted energy and is likely to increase the problem.

Are you feeling alone in your life? Do you feel a lack of support? Did you have some pain in the past that could cause you trouble?

Even if the cause of your pain is mainly physical, your recovery can be delayed by emotional feelings. Frustration is an emotional stressor, which can slow blood flow and make pre-existing pain worse.

 Many techniques exist to balance perception and thus our emotions. It is easy to start with a few books that will give you more insights about yourself. Having a mentor or a coach who helps you in a particular area where you are feeling stressed is also of huge benefits as you will learn to distance yourself from the stressful situation and get some techniques to deal with the situation itself and avoid staying stuck.

Regular exercising and relaxation techniques can be used when feeling stressed to help your body and mind to remain calm and healthy. Stress is so individual that it is difficult to present you with an exhaustive list of techniques. If you have some particular issues and wish to get in touch, I will be happy to give you more precise information relevant to your personal circumstances.