Are You Stressed?

Do you have frequent mood swings, get irritated easily, have trouble sleeping, forget simple things and feel overwhelmed and isolated? Stress may be the reason behind these signs.

Stress is the body’s normal response to a threat — an adaptive mechanism developed to increase the chances of survival when facing a predator or an imbalance of resources in the environment.

When faced with a predator, the organism sets an emergency system in motion (fight/flight): adrenaline is released, preparing the body to run or to fight, and oxygen consumption, heart rate and blood pressure all increase. Because it is an emergency, other systems are suppressed or scaled down — digestion, the immune system, the reproductive axis, growth — and there is also a suppression of pain and of the inflammatory response.

Nowadays human beings have no natural predators and are not commonly faced with threats to their survival — and yet ours is a society under stress. Why? Because today’s threats are mostly psychological, not physical: stress is psychological!

Today, the lion that once triggered a stress reaction (because it could kill us) is the boss, the traffic, the deadlines, the bills to pay, other people’s opinions of us, worry about possible illnesses, the endless to-do list, and so on.

These days it is not the real threat that stresses us, it is whatever we perceive as threatening — and all change can be threatening… Some of the situations generally identified as sources of stress are marriage, divorce, a promotion at work, unemployment, moving house, having a child, relationship and work conflicts, financial issues, and so on.

The effects of chronic stress are varied, and include sleep disturbances, headaches, anxiety, gastrointestinal problems, high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems and depression.

Studies indicate that people with high levels of stress catch colds more often (because the immune system is weakened). Children who grow up in stressful environments are smaller than their peers (because levels of growth hormone decrease). Fertility problems, very common nowadays, are suspected of being related to stress, which “switches off” the reproductive axis.

But stress also has significant effects on the brain, altering its patterns of functioning and even its size. It has been discovered that chronic stress destroys neurons in the hippocampus — the neural structure that is the seat of memory — which is why stressed people often become “more forgetful”.

During the body’s stress response a hormone, cortisol, is released. In chronic stress, excess cortisol is associated with weight gain, high blood pressure, diabetes and osteoporosis.

Then again, when the stress response is triggered, the body goes into fight-or-flight mode and access to the areas of complex, executive, strategic thinking is reduced. If we were facing a bear, it would not be the time to mull things over — it would be time to run! So this system, so well designed for real physical threats, ends up working against us in the face of psychological threats, because it denies us full access to the thinking, reflection and creativity we need in order to overcome the issue.

To reduce the stress we live under, we can use a variety of strategies, such as better time management, developing the capacity to accept life’s changes, and living more focused on the present moment.

Spending time with others, physical exercise and mindfulness meditation are among the most effective ways of reducing stress. So the next time you feel stressed, choose the company of someone dear to you, go for a walk, or meditate.