Stress is a two-edged sword.

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It can be helpful, sometimes prompting you to take necessary action. We really needed it when running from saber tooth tigers.  At other times, it can slow you down simply by keeping your brain so overactive you can't think clearly.  It can eventually stop  stop everything you’re doing either gradually or abruptly by eroding your physical and emotional health.

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With the burst of adrenaline acute stress gives you, you get stronger, more energetic and have more mental power to handle things usually beyond your capabilities.    Most of the time these days we are not in the wild fighting lions and tigers, but things do happen.  Several years ago some people visiting for a college graduation were walking in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with their two year old.  A mountain lion ran up and grabbed the two year old and ran off with him.  The boy’s father chased the lion, beat on him with his fists and the lion dropped the child and ran away.  The boy had puncture wounds from the lion’s teeth but was otherwise alright.  His Father’s body was using stress in a very healthy way to cope with the situation.   Under ideal circumstances, this fight-or-flight response gives us extra energy needed for rapid response.  It then subsides a few minutes after a threatening situation has passed.. The body then relaxes and returns to its normal state, and repairs itself from the effects of stress.  Your breathing, blood pressure, blood sugar, and hormone levels all normalize.

 

Chronic Stress

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When it is continuously present, stress can slow you down or even stop everything you’re doing due to illness it has caused, emotional or mental disturbances arising from it.  Chronic stress erodes your physical and emotional health, and impairs even your capacity to think and problem solve. It can create long lasting damage to your physical body.

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When stress is present it creates biological responses.  (Lengthening telomeres etc.)

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Chronic stress begins from outer sources impacting our lives, but can be maintained from within.  Our own thoughts, beliefs and perceptions can build on outer stressers and increase the impact that outer world stressers have. Or we create inner stress with long held negative beliefs held from the long ago past circumstances.  These lead to depression, anger, enzy and other negative feelings that drive the cycle of negative ruminations.  This can dampen our ability to enjoy positive things in life.  All gets tinged with a sense of things not being right with the world, negative thinking, and ongoing secretion of stress hormones. 

Some think that having the realization that this is happining is enough to change this form of maintaining stress.  It's not.  Patterns of thinking, and emotional overhangs become habitual, as well as perceptions, beliefs and the stress reactions they create.  To make a significant change in this, it's necessary to bring in patterns and habits of relaxation, seeing the positive and feeling it, being in just this moment and noticing it,  habits that include short meditations in which we let go of negative ruminations, bringing in a visualization and/or stable good feeling as internal base of operating.  Other stress reducers, positive state builders are exercising, awareness of food choices and the many things that activate the vagus nerve.

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    For now, back to what happens with chronic stress.  Once the chronic stress pattern is locked in, cortisol, the stress hormone, will keep flooding your system. This leads to massive inflammation.  These days information on eating to decrease inflammation is all around, but the first causal culprit is most likely  stress.

The adrenaline rush from the initial stress response can occasionally pose health risks,  but the more significant hazard is this ongoing release of cortisol. Generally considered a bad stress hormone, cortisol does serve many important functions — one of which is turning off inflammation, when stress is from an acute cause (mountain lion).  But when chronic stress exposes the body to a relentless stream of cortisol, as happens when stress is constant, cells become desensitized to the hormone, "causing inflammation to go wild," . Long-term chronic inflammation damages blood vessels and brain cells, leads to insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes) and promotes painful joint diseases.  It brings on massive signalling to divert resources to your sympathetic nervous system, creating sympathetic dominance.  This is the body continuously operating on high alert.  This has become a normal response to many ongoing aspects of modern life.  We live in some level of epidemic of chronic stress response.  Sympathetic dominance suppresses your parasympathetic’s ability to rest, digest, regenerate and detoxify. You remain in a stress state, and cortisol, the stress hormone,  accumulates.

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 When stress is chronic, you may experience:

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• Indigestion

• Hypertension

• Sleeplessness

• Irritability and anxiousness

• Brain fog

• Poor focus

• Frustration,

• Being short-tempered

• Headache, colds, and flu

• Decreased immune system function

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Finally, if you don’t maintain a healthy balance and your stress level escalates over time, you will eventually find yourself utterly exhausted. Stress takes a toll on your body and health. Your body's inability to rest and restore depletes your resources. You can no longer cope with your stressors, so you begin feeling burnout and extreme fatigue. The body’s immune system is suppressed.

 

High ongoing stress levels ultimately manifest as more severe illnesses including:

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• Fatty liver disease, Endometriosis

• Rheumatoid arthritis

• Type 2 diabetes

• Inflammatory bowel disease

• A variety of heart problems, including heart attack

• Cancer

• Weight Gain

• Depression

• Headaches

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To take this all further, let's look at some specific findings:

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Stress and the Brain

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Stress affects the brain in major ways. One of our main stress hormones, cortisol, binds to the emotional response areas of the brain (such as the amygdala) and keeps them on overdrive. The need to be constantly worried and on alert can lead to an increase in excitatory receptors in the emotional brain neurons — a genetic and molecular adaptation that maintains the level of stress felt necessary to match the environment’s demands.
Heightened brain preparedness can begin early on — for instance, when there is significant adversity in childhood, overactivation of the amygdala puts pressure on other brain areas to develop faster to increase awareness of one’s surroundings and try to dampen emotional arousal. The typical “infantile amnesia” period (roughly the first three years of life, when lasting conscious memory registration is minimal, given brain immaturity) can get shortened, as the environment is pushing us to pay attention and encode memories sooner, since our survival may be threatened.

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Weight Gain

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Stress hormones stimulate us to crave sugar, salt and fat.  That's why it's hard to say no to a candy bar at work or a plate of doughnuts. Or potato chips, now forbidden at my house, because I can't yet say no to them.  However,  we can cut out the self criticism when we learn that research has shown the link between stress and weight gain is more complex than poor food choices.  In a study published in Biological Psychiatry, women who had one or more stressful events in the previous 24 hours burned 104 fewer calories in the 7 hours following a fast food meal than women who ate a similar meal but were stress free.  Although 104 calories may not sound like much, over the course of a year it adds up to 11 pounds.  In addition to triggering these changes in metabolism, the stress response produces a rise in insulin levels and a fall in fat oxidation, a dual process resulting in fat storage says stress researcheer Janice Kiecolt-Glaser. professor of Psychiatry at Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus and the study's leading author.  Other studies have revealed definite correlations between excess cortisol and abdominal fat.

 

Slower Healing

 

New research shows that excess cortisol slows wound healing and slows vaccine effectiveness in older people who are caring for relatives.  In another of Kiecolt-Glaser's studies, older women caring for relatives with dementia took about 10 days longer to heal from a biopsy wound than a non caregiver control group.

The longer the stress goes on the longer the immune system is disrupted.  One mitigating factor in this is a person's support system.  The women with strong support systems of friends and family healed faster than those who lacked support.

 

Sleep Problems

 

Older adults often experience a decrease in the amount of deep sleep and an increase in nighttime wakefulness says sleep researcher Martica Hall, professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.  Stress aggravates these issues, making it harder for older people to get back to sleep at night.

Sleep deprivation makes memory worse and decreases emotional control, making it harder to control responses to further stress.  It can become a vicious cycle.

 

Depression

In the last decade researchers have reevaluated the role of stress in depression and brain health.  Stress can trigger a depressive episode, which then takes on a life of its own.  Stress throws several neurotransmitters out of balance, serotonin, dopamine and norephinephrine, negatively affecting mood, libido, appetite and sleep.

Some people suffering from severe depression have chronically elevated cortsol levels.  This condition can alter the hippocampus and permanently damage brain cells.

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Mental/Emotional Consequences of Stress

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These consequences of stress can make you feel that it’s difficult to concentrate, making decisions is a struggle

and feeling overwhelmed becomes normal.  Along with this you may have constant worrying, forgetfulness, Frustrations, anxiety, fears and maybe a lack of motivation or focus.​​

 

This leads to some or all of the following behaviours:

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• Being irritable and snappy

• Sleeping too much or too little

• Eating too much or too little

• Avoiding certain places or people

• Increased use of substances (including nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and illegal drugs)

 

These symptoms are frustrating, overwhelming, and may feel like a normalized part of life, particularly if you've been dealing with them for an extended period of time. It can be amazing to experience an extended period without these things, and it can be as life is.

 

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