There is something we all have a shared experience in as humans, and that thing is stress. That fight or flight feeling that we are all hardwired with. That thing inside us that lets us know that something is going on and it needs our attention by causing our hearts to race, breath to quicken, and sweat to start glazing our skin.
A perfect hormonal change and a physiological response are responsible for this reaction we have to a stressful situation. This stress response can keep us alive. It gives us a temporary infusion of heightened awareness, alertness, and energy that’s is needed to do whatever we can to survive that moment.
This “fight to flight” feeling doesn’t only happen in life or death situations, it can happen when we lose a job, think our spouse is lying to us, worried about missing a flight, and so many more relatable situations. Humans that experience this response in their daily lives, on a chronic level, face a lot of trouble down the road. I will elaborate more on that after I provide you with a background on what these hormones and physiological elements are, and what they cause the body to do.
When you perceive a threat, your sympathetic nerve fibers in the automatic nervous system get turned on. This results in a release of hormones, from the endocrine system, such as adrenaline, and cortisol. Adrenaline causes your heart to beat faster, increasing your blood pressure, resulting in a boost of energy.
Cortisol is the main character of the stress response and responsible for the rise in blood glucose, amplifies the brain’s use of glucose, increases the availability of the tissue repairing substances. Cortisol also suppresses nonessential functions for a stressful situation such as the digestive, reproductive systems, and any growth process. This “alarm system” also communicates with the brain that’s responsible for mood, fear, and motivation (Mayo Clinic Staff., 2019 [1])
Stress can cause structural changes in different parts of the brain, according to research done for 50 years on how stress affects the nervous system (Thierry et al.,1968 [2]). A prolonged state of stress, or chronic stress, can cause atrophy in the brain (waste away because of degeneration of cell (s), decline), meaning the mass and the weight if the brain decrease. These changes cause you to respond to stress differently, change your cognition, and memory. “Destructive effects of stress of Central Nervous System function.
. Aspects of function: memory. Main Area Involved: hippocampus (glucocorticoid receptors & Amygdala (Noradrenaline). Structural Changes: atrophy and neurogenic is disorders, decreasing dendritic branches, decreasing the number of neurons and synaptic terminals altering, decreasing neurogenesis hypocampus, reduction in hypocampus volume, modifying LTP. Functional Changes: declarative memory disorder, reduction in spatial memory, weakening verbal memory, disturbance in hippocampus-dependent loading area (Lupien et al., 2001 [3]).
Aspects of Function: cognition and Learning. Main Area involved: hippocampus, amygdala, and temporal lobe. Structural Changes: neurodegenerative processes activation (Li et al., 2008 [4]). Functional Changes: reducing of cognition (Scholey et al., 2014 [5]) making behavioral cognitive and mood disorders (Li et al., 2008 [4]), disorders in hippocampus-related cognition, and decreasing the reaction time (lupine er al., 2001 [6]).” In layman’s terms, stress can cause your brain size to shrink, cause you to forget words, or be at a loss for words, cripple your learning abilities, and harm your ability to remember properly.
The central nervous system is responsible for the function of your sensory receptors, long-term, and short-term memory. Long-term memory uses a lot of different parts of the brain, short-term memory relies on parts of the brain called the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe. The bridge that converts short-term memory into long-term memory is called the hippocampus. The hippocampus shows to be the most active part of the brain when it comes to responding to stress (Scoville and Milner, 1957 [7]).
The hippocampus has glucocorticosteroid and mineral receptors, this was proven in a study done on rats in 1968, in 1982 the specific agnostic was proven (McEwen et al., 1968 [8]. Since stress affects the brain and that part of the brain that is the most responsive to stress is the area that is responsible for converting our short-term memory into long-term memory, you will not retain information if you are stressed, and if you are chronically stressed you will have a hard time remembering past events or information.
Stress also affects your immune system and hurts its functions. People who are stressed get sick more often. There are many old documents that talk about how some people could resist severe disease with the power of their mind, perspective, and attitude, the mind-body connection (the link that connects your mind, emotions, body, and behavior) (Khansari et al., 1990 [9]). The mind-body understanding can be traced back to about 200 AC. There was this Greek Physician, who was also a surgeon, and a philosopher in the Roman Empire (no pressure..) by the name of Aelius Galenus, also known as Galenus of Pergamon. Galenus stated that women who were “melancholic” (people with melancholy have high-stress levels, resulting in a low immune system) had a higher chance of getting cancer than women who had a more positive perspective/ or mindset (Galen, Johnston, & Horsley., 2011 [10]).
In 1967 there was a study, and the research said that the chances of getting a disease following an abrupt, and extremely stressful life change, was much greater than before the life change (Holmes and Rahe, 1967 [11]). ‘in fact, stress can decrease the activity of cytotoxic T lymphocytes, and natural killer cells, and lead to the growth of malignant cells, genetic instability, and tumor expansion. Studies have shown that the plasma concentration of norepinephrine, which increases after the induction stress, has an inverse relationship with the immune function of phagocytes and lymphocytes (Reiche et al., 2014 [12]).”
According to what I learned from anatomy and physiology 2, cytotoxic T lymphocytes are responsible for the killing of viral infections, and other cells that are tainted by pathogens. Natural killer cells are responsible for rejecting tumors and virally infected cells. Stress directly interferes with the ability of these two important cells to do their job, resulting in leaving your body without a defense against “the bad guys”. Next time you’re stressed, try and observe how your body feels, write it down and read it when you are not stressed, compare it to how your body feels when it’s relaxed. In my own life, I know that a positive mindset or how stressed/negative one will directly affects my health.
Stress also affects the function of your cardiovascular system. Upon activation of the sympathetic nervous system (involuntary responses) under stress, heart rate increases, an increase in strength of contraction, vasodilation (the dilation of blood vessels) in the arteries of skeletal muscles, veins narrow, arteries in the spleen and kidney contract, and the sodium excretion by the kidneys decreases (Herd, 1991 [13]). Stress can also activate the parasympathetic nervous system (the rest and digest system), it can lead to stimulating the limbic system (the area of the brain that works with emotion and memory) and this will cause the heart rate to decrease, and could even stop the beat all-together (Herd, 1991 [13]).
In addition, “stress can modulate vascular endothelial cell function and increase the risk of thrombosis and ischemia as well as increase platelet aggregation (Rozanaski et al., 1999 [14])”. Stress also can lead people to engage in activities that are harmful to the heart like smoking, or drug use, and that leads to an array of sickness possibilities.
Stress also affects our nutrition and gastrointestinal (GI) health. When you’re stressed you can completely lose your appetite and cause yourself to be malnourished. On the other hand, you can overeat, and the food of choice is usually “comfort food”, fried foods, high sugar foods, foods with minimum to no nutritional value. The way we in our daily lives can also affect how we respond to stress.
Studies have shown that stress affects the process for absorption in your GI, how permeable your gut is, the secretion of acids and mucus in the stomach, and GI inflammation (Collins, 2001 [15]). I’m sure that at one point or another we have all felt our “stomach’s turn into knots” when something stressful happens.
Now that we have the information on how stress works in our bodies and just how dangerous it is long-term, we need to talk about how to deal with it in a healthy way. Everything has an equal opposite, the relaxation response is the stress responses equal opposite. The relaxation response, according to Benson, is a state relaxation and deep rest that can change your physical and emotional stress response. This practice/response is similar to chanting and breath-work.
The relaxation response lowers your heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen intake, and it helps ease symptoms of insomnia, depression, hypertension, arthritis, anxiety, cancer, aging, and so many more. Using the relaxation response daily will combat the stresses that you face daily. This could save your life. It can definitely give you a better quality of life. It’s such a simple exercise “You will learn that evoking the Relaxation Response is extremely simple if you follow a very short set of instructions which incorporate four essential elements: (1) a quiet environment;
I bet that you have also had a rapid bowel movement or couldn’t go at all due to stress, that’s because “ Stress also affects the movement of the GI tract. In this way, it prevents stomach emptying and accelerates colonic motility (Mönnikes et al., 2001[16]). In the case of irritable bowel syndrome, stress increases the movement (contractility and motility) of the large intestine (Mönnikes et al., 2001[16]).
(2) a mental device such as a word or a phrase which should be repeated in a specific fashion over and over again; (3) the adoption of a passive attitude, which is perhaps the most important of the elements; and (4) a comfortable position. Your appropriate practice of these four elements for ten to twenty minutes once or twice daily should markedly enhance your well-being” ((Benson & Klipper, 2001 [17]).
In conclusion, stress is there to keep us alive, not for us to keep it alive. If you want to prevent disease, sickness, mental health issues, and just feeling crummy, adopt healthy stress coping skills such as the relaxation response.
CITE:
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Guest Post Author: Alena Artemenko