You get an email at work telling you that a big project is due earlier than expected
You’re pulled over by a police officer
You’re about to go on your first date in a really long time
Your body, experiencing this alongside you, makes some adjustments and sends you the chemicals it thinks you need in order to combat these situations; making your palms sweat, your stomach turn, and your heart race while giving you laser focus, and faster reaction times.
Thanks body
But what happens when surprise deadline adjustments happen daily at your job? What happens when police frequently target you? What happens when your new relationship keeps you in a stress response for months? And what happens when all three of those things happen at once?
Let’s talk about stress.
Adrenaline and Cortisol
The two chemicals released by your adrenal glands when you’re stressed are Adrenaline and Cortisol. While adrenaline has reasonably predictable effects on most people, the interplay between cortisol and your body varies greatly depending on your lifestyle, body chemistry, and genetic make up. Some people gain weight when exposed to stressors, and some people lose weight. Some people crave sweets and carbs while under stress, while others eat much less than usual. Some get very talkative, and others go very quiet. You get the picture.
What is predictable is that when we are stressed our bodily processes are given different priorities depending on whether or not they serve our fight or flight response. Our digestive processes halt, which can lead to stomach discomfort and bloating, while tissue repair signals are boosted because our body believes it is under assault. Our growth and reproductive signals also slow, in lieu of functions necessary in fighting or fleeing.
On the short term this is called Acute Stress, otherwise known as the “fight or flight” response. This type of stress is a short lived reaction to a single event, such as a big exam, a presentation, a new date, or a musical performance. Sweaty palms, heart palpitations, butterflies in your stomach, and loose bowel movements can all accompany acute stress for a brief period of time but won’t have negative long term affects on your health.
This type of stress is at the core of our human experience and can help us finish assignments on time, have laser focus for an exam, or physically perform at a higher caliber. It might feel unpleasant in the moment, but if we didn’t have these reactions then in times of crises we’d have no way to kick ourselves into gear.
Now what happens when we get these reactions in succession?
Chronic Stress
You’ve come home from a long shift at work to a mailbox stuffed with bills and late fees that you can’t pay. The high crime rate in your area brings you face to face with unknown situations on the daily, and your two kids still need to be picked up from school.
You may be suffering from chronic stress.
If our stress response is regularly triggered, our body keeps releasing cortisol. When the chemical hangs out too long in our bodies it can interrupt our brain function, shrink the size of our brain, influence emotional disorders and impair long term learning. Chronic stress can come from many sources. Constant pressure from school or work, lack of safety in your community, financial stress, social unrest, over extending our commitments, stress in our relationships, PTSD, and chronic illnesses are all common examples of triggers for chronic stress.
The good news is our bodies have built in methods to turn off the production of cortisol and in turn, the stress reaction in our parasympathetic nerve system. The bad news is that if our bodies ALWAYS think there’s danger, the parasympathetic system never gets a chance to step in and work, leaving us with a constant “pedal to the metal” feeling.”Your long term health can be severely impacted by chronic stress leading to heart failure, stroke, and other serious problems. So what can we do?
Triggering your parasympathetic system
Your parasympathetic nervous system is not an unknowable process in your body. There are exercises and practices that have been proven to remind our parasympathetic nervous system to kick in and stop releasing the stress hormone cortisol. Being mindful of our eating habits can regulate our response to stressors. Planning your meals ahead of time (like doing meal prep or shopping with set recipes in mind) can take the stress out of what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The contents of those meals matter too. Medical News Today sited that there was a strong link between high anxiety and diets high in saturated fats and added sugars.
Daily mindfulness practice like deep breathing mentioned before, combined with meditation and calm personal time, can be helpful hints to your your body to stop a stress response and calm itself. You can find mindfulness in many activities like playing a sport, an instrument, or doing art of any kind: Any activity that reorients your body to take a moment for itself.
All of this being said, stress is a part of our daily lives and it is supposed to play a positive and functional role in how we confront the world that we live in. But when our environment consistently triggers that response over a long period of time, and doesn’t let us recover, it may be time to set aside moments in our day to remind our bodies to de-stress. That being said, making that time can be difficult and sometimes not practical. This is why it is so important to find solutions that are tailored to your schedule and lifestyle because one size does not fit all when it comes to regulating stress.
So take a deep breath, take some time to do what you love, and always remember that your health matters.
Victoria Chu Yang Heu
