What is Stress?

Essentially, stress is a measure of your mental and physical resistance to circumstances beyond your control. Stressors are threats, demands, or changes to which you attach special importance or weight, and with which you may struggle or feel uncertainty. Common stressors include loss of spouses or family members, not enough money, too much work, work and personal relationship struggles, and other fears of loss and inability to meet external demands. Your ability to adapt to stressors in healthy ways is key for health preservation. 

Healthy Adaptation to Stress is a Conscious Choice

Upon encountering stressors you have two choices: (1) to adapt to the situational demands and “go with the flow” by doing something to create change or otherwise ameliorate the situation, or (2) to “mal-adapt” by withdrawing or pushing beyond normal expectations in an effort to make the stress disappear. Sometimes “easier said than done,” adapting may require repeated conscious effort.

By opting for unhealthy coping strategies such as drug or alcohol abuse, overeating, or overworking, you subject your body to detriment additional to the natural physical consequences of stress. When mal-adaptive behaviors become habitual reactions, you may end up feeling "addicted" to these distractions from stress. However, every time particular stressor challenges you, you are given the opportunity to choose to adapt healthfully, no matter how you coped with it the last time around.

How Does Stress Affect You Physically?

Beyond the obvious problems mal-adaptive coping strategies such as smoking, overeating, and drug or alcohol abuse can eventually lead to, there are other physiological changes induced by emotional stress. These physiological changes occur as a result of your immediate hormonal reaction to stress, more commonly known as your “fight or flight” response, or survival mechanism.

When you experience stress, stress hormones flood your bloodstream so that you can act quickly and with strength. Watching your child blindly run across a busy street, for example, might induce this hormonal response which enables you to catch him or her before any harm is done. Specifically, your pituitary gland discharges ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone) into the bloodstream. ACTH, in turn, catalyzes the release of two catecholamine hormones, epinephrine (adrenalin) & norepinephrine (noradrenaline), from your sympathetic nerves into the bloodstream. Catecholamines, produced by the adrenal glands, serve as neurotransmitters which signal the body to prepare for emergency action. 

Physiological changes induced via catecholamine release include increased heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, and muscle tension, which serve to ensure that adequate blood supply will quickly reach your brain and musculoskeletal system. Catecholamine release also results in higher levels of cholesterol, free fatty acids, and blood sugar, which provide immediate energy to survive the perceived emergency.  

It is the general absence of emergency action actually taken in response to the stressor, despite the catecholamine release, which may deplete your health. In most emotionally stressful social situations, for example those that result from ongoing work or personal relationships, you don’t actually flee or fight. Instead, you grin and bear it, and end up storing the stress as tension in your muscles, rather than dissipating its effects through movement, for which your body has prepared. Additionally, your reaction to the stressor may include feelings of helplessness or futility, which might cause your stress hormones to continue to surge. Constant or chronic stress can wreck your nervous system through cyclic adrenaline rush.

Stress Affects the Autonomic Nervous System

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS), responsible for catecholamine release, is one of two branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The autonomic nervous system, over which you have no voluntary control, is also referred to as the visceral nervous system because it controls your internal organs, including the heart, smooth muscles of blood vessels, intestines, and glands. The other branch of the ANS is the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which works in opposition with the SNS by facilitating digestion, and otherwise calming and relaxing the body.

Health Effects of Short Term and Long Term Stress

While short term, or acute, stress can serve a beneficial physiological purpose, chronic, or long term, stress, unfortunately, can deplete your health. In addition to causing oxidative stress, sustained catecholamine release can subject you to chronically elevated blood pressure, or hypertension, which is a risk factor for cardiovascular problems such as heart failure and sudden death. Too much stress can lead you down the road of burnout, and maybe steer you toward an imbalanced ANS, or even a systematic disorder. 

If you are chronically stressed, you might initially notice it through symptoms such as headache, achy neck, ulcer, allergies, and diminished sexual desire. Eventually, your body will adapt to continued vigilance by producing excess cortisol. Too much cortisol, over time, can exhaust you, accelerate the aging process, harm your immune system, and even damage your brain. Such hormonal overdose may result from stressing your adrenal glands to the brink of exhaustion.

Besides stressful situations, if you suffer from other conditions such as anxiety, depression, diabetes, hypertension, insulin resistance, obesity, and sleep apnea you might experience stress hormone release. Behavior and lifestyle, especially overwork, overstress, and exhaustion (aka ‘burnout’), as well as sedentary living, sleep deprivation, abuse of stimulants, hostility, smoking, social isolation, and an unhealthy diet also contribute to the stress reaction.

Healthy Stress Management is a Lifestyle Choice

The ANS is sensitive to your emotions and will trigger SNS activity when you are startled, frightened, or anxious. The subsequent fight or flight response will continue until you believe the perceived threat has ceased. Since your emotions can trigger physiological changes that can negatively affect your health, developing adaptive strategies to manage stress is of vital importance.

An important step in learning how to adapt to stress is to recognize the situations that create it: poor communication, unfulfilled expectations, retirement, loss of a loved one, job pressures, bad relationships, and dwelling upon past events or imagined future ones. Healthy reactions to stress, then, involve generating positive attitudes and beliefs about your abilities to respond to stressful situations in a positive manner. 

Since stress is truly a mind/body phenomenon, part of healthy stress management also involves physiological manipulation through mind/body techniques which simultaneously increase PNS activity and decrease SNS activity. Yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, and Qi Gong are some optimal long-term methods of lowering SNS activity to assuage the effects of emotional stress. Regularly practicing any of these methods helps together train the body and mind to adapt healthfully to stress through relaxation and breathing. Grounding, an alternative healing mode, will also shift ANS in a balanced direction.

You have the power, in each given moment, to choose to adapt to stressors in a healthy way. Recognizing that it’s not all in your mind, you can start to minimize stress by refusing to “sweat the small stuff.” Breathing through emotionally stressful situations can also facilitate adaptation, rather than mal-adaption. Attempting to manipulate your nervous system activity through mind/body medicine can also help keep SNS activity at bay. Be sure also to maintain a strong immune system through a Heart Healthy Lifestyle.  

Check out Lower Your Blood Pressure in Eight Weeks, and Heartbreak and Heart Disease for related information. Additionally, for an in-depth exploration of grounding, you can check out Dr. Sinatra’s new book, Earthing, now in bookstores. 

© 2009 - 2010 Heart MD Institute, PA