What goes on inside our body when we are chronically stressed? Sharon Horesh Bergquist gives us a look at what goes on inside our body when we are chronically stressed.
Key Takeaways
Stress is a feeling we all experience when we are challenged or overwhelmed. But more than just an emotion, stress is a hard-wired physical response that travels throughout your entire body.
In the short-term, stress can be advantageous, but when activated too often or too long, your primitive fight-or-flight stress response not only changes your brain, but also damages many of the other organs and cells throughout your body.
Your adrenal gland releases the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine. As these hormones travel through your bloodstream, they easily reach your blood vessels and heart.
- Adrenaline causes your heart to beat faster and raises your blood pressure, over time causing hypertension.
- Cortisol can also cause the endothelium, or inner lining of blood vessels, to not function normally.
Scientists now know that this is an early step in triggering the process of atherosclerosis, or cholesterol plaque build up in your arteries. Together, these changes increase your chances of a heart attack or stroke.
When your brain senses stress, it activates your autonomic nervous system. Through this network of nerve connections, your big brain communicates stress to your enteric, or intestinal nervous system.
Besides causing butterflies in your stomach, this brain-gut connection can disturb the natural rhythmic contractions that move food through your gut, leading to IBS, and can increase your gut insensitivity to acid, making you more likely to feel heartburn.
VIA the gut’s nervous system, stress can also change the composition and function of your gut bacteria, which may affect your digestive and overall health.
Chronic stress can increase your waistline.
Cortisol can increase your appetite. It tells your body to replenish your energy stores with energy dense foods and carbs, causing you to crave comfort foods.
High levels of cortisol can cause you to put on the extra calories as visceral or deep belly fat.
- This type of fat is an organ that actively releases hormones and immune system chemicals called cytokines that can increase your risk of developing chronic diseases, such as heart disease and insulin resistance.
Stress hormones affect the immune cells in a variety of ways. Initially, they help prepare to fight invaders and heal after injury, but chronic stress can dampen function of some immune cells, make you more susceptible to infections and slow the rate you heal.
Stress has been associated with shortened telomeres, the shoelace tip ends of chromosomes, that measure a cell’s age.
Telomeres cap chromosomes to allow DNA to get copied every time a cell divides without damaging the cell’s genetic code and they shorten with each cell division. When telomeres become too short, a cell can no longer divide and it dies.
Chronic stress has even more ways it can sabotage your health, including acne, hair loss, sexual dysfunction, headaches, muscle tension, difficulty concentrating, fatigue and irritability.
Your life will always be filled with stressful situations. But what matters to your brain and entire body is how you respond to that stress.
If you can view those situations as challenges you can control and master, rather than threats that are insurmountable, you will perform better it the short-run and stay healthy in the long-run.