Stress is an unpleasant fact of life. We all experience it for various reasons, and we all try to come up with ways of coping with it—some with more success than others. So what exactly is stress doing to your mind (and body) when you’re staring down a deadline? And what can you do to power through it?
The real problem with stress is that, for such a well understood and universally experienced condition, as a society we deal with it so poorly that it leads to many of our most lethal illnesses and long-term health problems. High blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, stroke, obesity, and insomnia are all medical conditions across the spectrum that can be related to or directly influenced by high stress as an environmental condition.
In order to cut through some of that fog, let’s take a brief look at what stress is, how it impacts us on a physical and mental level, and finally what we can do about it, with the help of some experts.
Defining Stress: Acute and Chronic
Everyone experiences stress in some way, shape, or form. We all recognize when we’re in stressful situations, and we all know when we’re stressed. At the same time, stress is more than just a feeling that we have a lot to deal with. For the purposes of our explainer, we’re focusing on so-called “bad stress,” as opposed to “good stress,” like the kind of you experience on a roller coaster (if you went on willingly), when you get a big promotion, or kiss someone for the first time. Aside from good stress, there are primarily two types of stress: Acute (short-term) stress that’s usually a response to a specific influence (called a stressor), and chronic (long-term) stress that sticks with you and could either have sprung from a short-term stress that stuck with you, or a constant state of stress that you’re under due to persistent stressors and conditions. Photo byBecky Wetherington.
Acute Stress:
Acute stress is the type of stress you experience when you have an immediate reaction to something you’re presented with. This is the “in the moment” kind of fight or flight response that you have when you have to speak in a meeting, your boss just asked you to stay late, you’re startled by a sudden noise, or someone on the internet makes a ill-informed comment about your favorite smartphone platform/operating system/hardware manufacturer. (How could they!?)
Acute stress is defined by the fact that it’s immediate and short term. In most cases, once the stressor has been removed, your body and mind return to a normal state.
Chronic Stress:
Chronic stress is entirely different, and is characterized by its long-term nature. This is the type of stress that you feel that you’re under every day, with no reprieve from the things that make you feel stressed. Most chronic stressors are situations, for example, in which you dislike your job and detest going every day, being there all day, and thinking about it when you leave. Living paycheck-to-paycheck and struggling with financial security issues is another common source of chronic stress that many people are familiar with.
Its these types of chronic stress situations that are the most dangerous. They keep your body’s defenses activated and heightened longer than is generally healthy, and unfortunately more and more of us are living under constant conditions that create stress. Add to this the fact that “coping with stress” isn’t exactly a topic you learn in school and you have a recipe for a lot of very unhappy people.
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What’s Actually Happening When You’re Stressed
Your body shows signs of stress in two ways: first, the rush of hormones that elevate your heart rate, boost your blood pressure, and stop your digestion, and then second the symptoms that you experience and are aware of, like clenched teeth, headaches, and emotional upset.
Most of us can tell when we’re stressed momentarily, or are just feeling stressed out generally, but there’s a lot going on inside our bodies when we’re stressed that play a role in our health.
Symptoms:
The most common and recognizable symptoms of stress are the ones most of us know all too well: insomnia, headaches, jaw pain, back and neck pain, stuttering, heartburn and nausea, nervousness and anxiety, fidgeting, nail-biting, lateness and trouble focusing, and a lack of interest in work or activities that are normally interesting. The American Institute of Stress (AIS) has a list of 50 common signs and symptoms of stress that include these, but also note a number of other symptoms that you may not have immediately associated with stress and not another condition like depression.
For example, behavioral changes that lead to other conditions can also be signs of stress, like addictive tendencies, a sudden interest in smoking, alcohol, excessive eating, or gambling, or any other addictive behavior that can be interpreted as an escape from chronic stressors. Often, even subconsciously, many of us try to escape stressful situations or conditions by blocking them out or escaping by way of anything that makes us feel better. Even if it’s fleeting, it’s common to search out an escape so you can relax for a while.
The AIS notes that stress reactions can also lead to isolation, loneliness, and severe depression as well. If you’ve been suddenly feeling alone, forgetful, overly defensive, disorganized, uninterested in your everyday life, overwhelmed by what’s going on around you to the point where you need to lie about them, and having difficulty communicating with others, it’s possible that chronic, poorly managed stress may be part of the problem.
Physiological Effects of Stress:
While stress is most often discussed in terms of how it changes our mental and emotional condition, stressors and stressful situations also have a profound impact on our bodies. Stressors, whether they’re acute or chronic, immediately set off the body’s fight-or-flight response, flooding your system with stress hormones like norepinephrine and cortisol that are meant to give you a needed boost in dangerous situations.
In short and small bursts, those hormones can make you more alert, more perceptive, raise your heart rate so your muscles get more blood to them, and raise your breathing rate so you get more oxygen into your lungs. Your digestive processes stop entirely so your body doesn’t waste energy processing food when it needs all the energy it can muster to survive. It’s a good thing if, say, you’re dashing across a busy street or escaping a burning building, but keeping your body’s fight or flight response turned on all the time and those stress hormones at high levels in your body is unhealthy.
If these hormones stay in your system for too long, they can eventually lead to high blood pressure and increased heart rate, stress-induced hypertension and stroke risk, ulcers and other gastrointestinal distress, a suppressed immune system, fatigue, sexual issues like impotence and decreased libido. After all, those stress hormones are meant to be in our systems for a short period while we deal with an acute stressor, at a time where we need all of our faculties about us. Over the long term, keeping the body on full alert is more of a detriment than a benefit
Credit to Life Hacker.