What causes stress, and why is it important to lower your stress levels?
Have you ever met someone who doesn’t experience much stress? It’s pretty rare. While certain types of stress are good (eustress), usually intense and brief stresses like exercise, a cold shower or getting outside your comfort zone every now and then, long term, chronic stress (distress) has been proven to be a significant factor in creating a large variety of health problems.
There are different categories of Stress:
- Mental Stress, like anxious thoughts and worrying about the past or future
- Chemical Stresses, like toxins and infections
- Emotional Stresses, like Anger and Sadness, or traumas
- And Physical Stresses, like Hunger, Cold, Exhaustion etc
All of these are, to some degree, ‘normal’, and yet any of these stresses, once excessive, can cause significant and debilitating levels of suffering (distress), which can lead to health issues sooner or later.
Any of the above stimuli can lead to being in a state of stress, which is where your fight or flight response activates your adrenal glands to release a cocktail of Neurochemicals into your body to help cope with the situation. Adrenaline, Noradrenaline and Cortisol are the 3 main Neurochemicals that are released.
Adrenaline and Noradrenaline increase your heart rate, bring more blood flow into the muscles and lungs, give you a surge of energy and raise your blood pressure.
Cortisol increases glucose levels in your blood, activates your brain to use more glucose and makes the substances that repair tissues more readily available in your body.
All of this response is Good and Healthy, IF it is temporary (a few hours at most) and occasional (not every day).
When you’re stressed, you can feel:
- Angry, irritable or uptight
- Overwhelmed
- Unable to focus
- Anxious and Worried
- Afraid
If the Stress is Extreme enough, or Chronic enough, or both, you can go into another mode called the Dorsal Vagal Mode. In this state, the body has decided it is not worth fighting anymore, and the best strategy is to conserve energy and ‘play dead.’
In this case, heart rate and blood pressure can go down, respiration decreases, energy production and metabolism decreases, and the person experiences very little energy or motivation, due to downregulation of Dopamine.
This is often described as being depressed [1].
In either case, whether you stay Chronically in a high stress state, or a Depressed state, or vacillation between the two, Prolonged exposure to these stress states can lead to many health problems, such as: