The Chemicals of Stress

You undoubtedly know that long-term stress can harm your health. The body is perfectly geared up to handle stress - of the short-term kind.

You have heard of the fight/flight response. When you perceive that you are under threat, your body responds with a cascade of chemicals that prepare your body to either stay and fight or flee. Once the threat is no longer present, the body can then calm down once more.

Unfortunately, we live very different lives to our early ancestors whose main threats may have been the sighting of a dangerous wild animal once in a while or attack by a neighbouring tribe.

Today, we are exposed to many things on a day to day basis that we perceive as threats to some degree or another. For many people, a day spent in the workplace with excessive demands equals a stress filled one. Add to that uncertainties about viruses, energy bill increases and rise in cost of living and many of us can find ourselves living in a kind of soup of stress.

This means that our primitive stress response, the fight/flight response, designed to help us deal with the occasional life threatening event, can be turned on almost permanently to some degree or another. This is why some people eventually experience burn-out, chronic fatigue or some other stress-related condition.

There are two main chemicals involved in the stress response. When a threat is perceived, the body secretes adrenaline and cortisol.

Adrenaline secreted by the adrenal glands that sit atop the kidneys, increases the heart rate and elevates blood pressure in order to boost energy supplies.

Cortisol increases sugars in the bloodstream, enhances the brain’s use of glucose and increases the availability of substances that repair tissues. It also reduces non-essential functions as it diverts the body’s energy to deal with the threat at hand. These include suppression of the immune response, the digestive system, the reproductive system and growth processes.

You can see then how the very frequent triggering of the stress response and therefore very frequent secretion of adrenaline and cortisol might eventually have deleterious effects on the health of the body.

Indeed, long-term stress is associated with anxiety, depression, digestive problems, headaches, muscle tension, heart problems, high blood pressure, sleep difficulties, reproductive issues, weight problems and memory and concentration problems as we saw in my blog post “3 Ways Stress Can Affect the Brain and What to do About It.”.

Being able to emerge from the stress response is therefore extremely important for your long-term health and well-being. In terms of your nervous system, this means engaging what is known as the parasympathetic or ‘rest and repair’ branch of the nervous system for when we do so, our bodies have a chance to reset and repair.

There are many things you can do to help yourself. These include

Yoga, tai chi, qigong

Meditation

Relaxation practices

An absorbing hobby

Walking and other kinds of exercise that do not themselves put the body under stress

Being in nature

Regular breaks throughout the day that are used in a meaningfully relaxing way can also help. You might find this blog post interesting and useful here.

Another important consideration is developing resilience. How we respond to circumstances, other people, and life in general has a great deal to do with the levels of harmful stress we experience.

The truth is we all are stressed by different things and to differing degrees. This can have a lot to do with our early experiences, our personal make-up and the behaviours that were modelled to us growing up. Exposure to overwhelmingly stressful events growing up or on an ongoing basis, or trauma can make us more susceptible.

This is where therapy can be enormously useful. You can not only learn new ways of responding to your old triggers for stress but also reduce your base levels caused by difficult life events that may have made you susceptible to excessive stress responses in the present.

I have a programme called “Stress Free” that you can view here that is designed for just that.

I also run free relaxation sessions online once a month where you can experience what it feels like to really relax and engage your parasympathetic nervous system.