How Stress Affects Your Body

Dr. Sharon Bergquist gives us a tour:

Stress, from the inside out

Stress is a natural physical and emotional response to challenges or being overwhelmed. It can be beneficial in short-term situations (e.g. escape from a tiger) but is harmful when prolonged or frequent (e.g. escape the rat-race).

Immediate physiological response: cortisol, adrenaline (epinephrine), and norepinephrine are released by the adrenal glands.

The effects this has (non-exhaustive list; we’re just citing what’s in the video here):

• Cortisol impairs blood vessel function, promoting atherosclerosis.
• Adrenaline increases heart rate and blood pressure, leading to hypertension.
• Stress disrupts the brain-gut connection, causing:
  • Digestive issues like irritable bowel syndrome and heartburn.
  • Changes in gut bacteria composition, potentially affecting overall health.
• Cortisol increases appetite and cravings for energy-dense “comfort foods”.
  • This in turn promotes visceral fat storage, which raises the risk of heart disease and insulin resistance.
• Immune-specific effects:
  • Stress hormones initially aid in healing and immune defense.
  • Chronic stress weakens immune function (by over-working it constantly), increasing susceptibility to infections and slowing recovery.
• Other systemic effects:
  • Chronic stress shortens telomeres, which protect chromosomes. Shortened telomeres accelerate cellular aging.
  • Chronic stress can also cause acne, hair loss, sexual dysfunction, headaches, muscle tension, fatigue, irritability, and difficulty concentrating.

So, how to manage this? The video says that viewing stressful situations as controllable challenges, rather than insurmountable threats, leads to better short-term performance and long-term health.

Which would be wonderful, except that usually things are stressful precisely because they are not entirely within the field of our control, and the usual advice is to tend to what we can control, and accept what we can’t.

However… That paradigm still leaves out the very big set of “this might be somewhat within our control or it might not; we really don’t know yet; we can probably impact it but what if we don’t do enough, or take the wrong approach and do the wrong thing? And also we have 17 competing stressors, which ones should we prioritize tending to first, and…” and so on.

To that end, we suggest checking out the “Want to learn more?” link we drop below the video today, as it is about managing stress realistically, in a world that, if we’re honest about it, can sometimes be frankly unmanageable.

Meanwhile, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

Heart Health vs Systemic Stress ← this is good in and of itself, and also links to other stress-related resources of ours

Take care!