Chronic Stress is Bad for You. Here’s Why.

You start your day running late for work and then the egg from your fast food egg sandwich slides from between the sausage and bun and lands squarely in your lap.  When you arrive at work you discover your so-called co-worker has not completed his co-share of the workload and it falls upon you to pick up his slack.

Next, your boss dumps enough work on you to keep you busy through your previously free weekend. When you finally get out of there, you get stuck in construction which adds another 45 minutes to your already too long commute home.

Finally, when you arrive home you discover your angelic child is the object of a cyber-bullying campaign and no one made dinner. For many people, this, or some variation of it, is what’s referred to as a normal day with never ending stress;  and all that stress will eventually have a detrimental effect on your health.

Back in our hunter-gatherer past, stress played a very vital role in our survival. It helped our ancestor’s bodies prepare to either fight or flee (fight or flight response) depending upon the situation. Saber-tooth tiger charging at you after you just broke your spear? Run like hell and hope for the best. Going on the hunt for some much-needed bison meat? Sharpen those arrows and spears and get ready for a fight.

In those fight or flight moments, the control tower in our brain called the hypothalamus triggers our adrenal gland to release stress hormones known as adrenaline and cortisol. It also quickens our heart and breathing rates and causes our muscles to tense up and get ready for action. Our breathing and heart rates quicken in order to get oxygenated blood to those tensed muscles in case you are required to either fight or flee.

If neither is required, things return to normal after the threat has passed. Thousands of years ago, those fight or flight moments were rare. However, today something as mundane as rush hour traffic when you are late for your child’s piano recital can trigger the same responses a mastodon triggered in our distant relatives. And those stressful moments just seem to keep on coming; which eventually negatively effects our health.

Other responses within our bodies when under stress include the constriction of blood vessels in order to divert oxygenated blood to vital muscles. This, combined with an increased heart rate, raises our blood pressure, and if your heart works too hard for too long, this can increase the risk of heart attack. The increased breathing rate that is triggered by stressful situations can also exacerbate those who suffer from breathing related issues such as asthma, bronchitis and emphysema.

When we are under stress, our livers also jump into action by producing extra glucose to provide muscular energy. However, like everything else involved with chronic stress, if this reaction occurs over and over again, day after day, it will have health consequences, in this case, increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Lastly, chronic stress can lead to problems with your digestive system, causing heart burn, acid reflux, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

Chronic stress, like a disease, has common symptoms that help reveal its presence and they usually are some or all of the following: irritability, anxiety, depression, headaches, insomnia and gastro-intestinal issues. Studies have also shown that chronic stress can cause over or under eating, alcohol and/or drug abuse and social withdrawal. Yes, the easiest way to avoid all these unwanted effects of stress are to avoid it, but that is much easier than it sounds.  There are numerous ways to deal with stress since it usually cannot be totally avoided, but that is the topic for next week.

All this because our bodies cannot differentiate between being attacked by wolves and unreasonable work deadlines.