Stress: The Physical Stress Response -The Fallout

So, we now understand what happens to our bodies when we are stressed, but what are the repercussions?

When we elicit the fight-or-flight response so often throughout the day, the excess adrenaline, cortisol and other stress hormones play havoc with the body’s normal functions.

For the body to decrease blood flow to our organs is great for when we want to run really fast, but not so great for our digestion or getting rid of toxins from our blood.

Increasing our blood pressure and blood sugar works well to get more fuel and oxygen to our muscles, but it’s not so crash hot for our heart health and diabetes risk.

When we are constantly stressed, we are in a constant state of arousal that is unsustainable to our normal bodily processes, and if we stay in this state too long, eventually our body gets run down and goes in to exhaustion.  

Here’s a quick look at what that actually might look like.

Sleep

Do you find it difficult to sleep when you have a lot on your mind? Well, apart from the increased brain function and conscious thought keeping you awake, you can go ahead and blame this one on cortisol. There is an inverse ratio between cortisol and melatonin (the hormone that makes you sleep), meaning that as one increases the other decreases. We know from last week that cortisol gets pumped out at a high rate during the stress response, which means our melatonin level remains low. This is one of the main reasons we find it difficult to sleep when we’re stressed.  Even when we do finally fall asleep (due to pure exhaustion), we can find it difficult to reach deep (delta wave) sleep because our melatonin level is too low to push us down in to this stage.

Immune function

Have you ever noticed that we get sick more often and for longer when we can least afford to at work, or wondered why we break out with a pimple the day of a big date?

It’s a side effect of the body prioritising escape from danger at the expense of all else.

Our immune system starts going haywire and suppresses the cytokines (immune system messengers) that activate our natural immunities, whilst the pro-inflammatory cytokines start acting up and causing inflammation.  This creates the perfect environment for bacteria and viruses to worm their way in and take hold, not to mention inflammatory diseases!

Mental ill health

It’s no secret that stress plays a big part in our mental health. Study after study has proven that chronic stress can lead to anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and many other mental disorders.  Many of these studies have even shown that chronic stress alters our brain chemistry and neural pathways, making us more prone to stress and less able to regulate our fight or flight response, even when the ‘threat’ has passed.

Chronic illness

Chronic illness, for the most part, is typically considered to be based on our lifestyles, and chronic stress is certainly a major part of that.

It inhibits insulin sensitivity and glucose regulation, increasing our risk of type 2 diabetes; it lowers the production of HDL (good) cholesterol and boosts the production of LDL (bad) cholesterol, leading to increased risk of heart disease; and it causes the heart to work much harder, which can lead to a thickening of the ventricular walls and greatly increases our risk of heart attack and stroke. In short, stress disrupts our body’s ability to regulate itself and puts us at huge risk of developing the diseases we usually relate to eating too many chips and cakes!

Gut health

As we start to understand more and more about our gut, the vital role it plays in our health is becoming much clearer. It is now understood that our enteric nervous system and microbiome have a huge impact on our mental health, and our mental health has a huge impact on them in return. When we’re exposed to chronic stress, the volume and diversity of our microbiota decreases, causing (among many other things) a shift in our mood and ability to regulate stress.

Whilst these are some pretty huge health impacts of chronic stress, they’re not the only ones.

Suffice it to say that stress is a major contributor when it comes to illness, and that controlling our physical reaction to stress is a huge step towards being healthier in both mind and body.

With this in mind, next week we will take a look at some strategies we can employ to limit our physical stress response and try to reduce our chance of developing some of the nasty things above.

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