The effects of chronic stress on the body are many and varied. I think you know as well as I do that stress can have a negative impact on your health, but do you realize how devastating poorly-managed stress can be on your quality of life and the incredible impact it can have on your health? The list of significant medical problems that are caused or exacerbated (made worse) by chronic stress could fill an entire Pathology textbook. I will review a few of them here so that you can take action to prevent some or all of these untoward effects on your health.
To understand the effects of chronic stress on the body, it’s very helpful to know a little bit about what the body’s stress response is and how it works. Your body’s stress response is a wonderful thing to have when you need it, that helps protect you from real danger, like the threat of an attacking bear or a couple of muggers. When you sense pending danger, your body kicks into gear and blood flows to your muscles so you can run faster or fight with more power. The primary organ that is triggered to respond to a pending threat is your adrenal gland – actually, both of your adrenal glands (you have a set of two sitting on top of your kidneys). Your adrenals will pump out large amounts of adrenalin or epinephrine and glucocorticoids, including cortisol, which then elevates your blood sugar to provide you with more quick energy and elevates your blood pressure to deal with the immediate threat. These responses are very good things when you are facing immediate danger, but these same useful responses can be very detrimental to your health when they aren’t needed, but are still invoked chronically. The stress-response, also known as the fight-or-flight response, is designed to combat short-term stressors only. In today’s fast-paced environment, you may become anxious and feel threatened by many things which aren’t threatening in the same way as an attacking bear is, but your body still responds as if you are being attacked by that bear. Most of your stressors today are emotional or mental in nature, and your stress can become constant (chronic), having many detrimental effects on your health. Here are some of the chronic effects of stress on your body (taken from a list in Wikipedia):
Long-term effects of epinephrine (adrenalin)
- Decreased immune response
- Altered protein & fat metabolism
- Increased chance of high blood pressure
- Decreased digestion
- Inhibited tissue repair
Long-term effects of Cortisol & Glucocorticoids
- Muscle & connective tissue wastage
- Hyperglycemia (elevated blood sugar level)
- Suppression of the immune response
- Suppression of healing
- Damage to the hippocampus. In two studies Vietnam vets & women exposed to sexual abuse displayed up to 8% shrinkage of the hippocampus. It’s not known if this is reversible. (Simon, 2006)
Effects of Chronic Stress on the body
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When you’re feeling really stressed out, you need to manage your stress quickly and effectively. When you’re feeling like you’re about to “blow your top” or you’re hanging by a thread, or if you are just feeling completely overwhelmed, you need to do something to relieve your stress and you need to do it quickly. When you’re feeling stressed out, you are not in a good state, and you need to change your state of mind and change it quickly. Usually you don’t have a lot of time, so you need something that you can do in 5 minutes or less. The first thing that I do when I’m feeling very frustrated or overwhelmed or I feel the anger building is to take a deep breath – a real deep breath. Then I do it again nice and slowly, relaxing my whole body as I breathe. Then I do one or more of the following:
- Continue to breathe deeply and slowly for a few minutes, feeling more and more relaxed as I breathe. I concentrate on breathing in the good energy and breathing out the bad, negative energy.
- Smile. It’s amazing how something as simple as a smile can really change your state of mind and give you a new perspective on your problem or challenge. When you start smiling , it’s hard to stay angry, frustrated, depressed, or overwhelmed for long, if at all.
- Move. You can get up and stretch, take a short, brisk walk, or do some brief exercises, including various stretches, yoga, isometric exercises, etc. Continue reading →
Jet Blue Flight Attendant, Steven Slater, has suddenly become a folk hero in the past 2 days because he had just had enough – he was mad as hell and he just couldn’t take it anymore. Obviously, a lot of people can relate to Steven Slater. He has become an instant cult hero because he couldn’t take the rude behavior of a couple airline passengers anymore, especially the woman who jumped up too early out of her seat while the plane was landing and grabbed her bag out of the overhead bin, hitting Steven in the face with it, then, instead of apologizing to Steven, the passenger swore at him. Steven had had enough. He went to the mike and started swearing at the rude passenger(s), then grabbed 2 beers from the fridge, popped open the emergency exit door and slid down to the ground and left the airport.
Apparently an awful lot of people relate to Steven’s frustration and support him in his rant and the behavior that got him arrested and fired. Certainly, there’s a lot of people who feel like telling their customers off when they’re rude, but they bite their tongues instead, and there are plenty of people who wish they could tell their bosses to take-this-job-and-shove-it. For an idea of how many supporters Steven Slater has gained from his antics, you just have to look at Facebook and see all the Fan Pages that have popped up in support of him and just how many fans these pages accumulated Continue reading →
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Tagged Anger justified, How to Manage Stress, Steven Slater, Steven Slater Facebook Fan Pages, Steven Slater fired, Steven Slater Flight Attendant, Steven Slater HIV Positive, Steven Slater Rant, Steven Slater Stress Relief Method, Steven Slater to face prison time, Steven Slater Working Class Hero, Steven Slater's Behavior, Stress Management, Stress Relief, Stress Relief Method, Take this Job and Shove it
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We all experience more or less stress every day. If you’re living the life you want to live, then most of your days will be very fulfilling and you’re probably not going to be bothered by stress or distress. You will still have stress in your life, because it’s part of living, but it’s not going to be likely to bother you to any great extent or to be a setback for you. You learn to handle challenges as they come up and most of the dousing “water” just rolls off your back. People who handle their day-to-day stress well keep everything in perspective and they have a plan in life. They’ve set goals and they work toward achieving them. They aren’t troubled by minor setbacks, and most setbacks seem minor to them. The ones that don’t, may give them pause, and may present a more formidable challenge, but it causes them to look at things anew and gain a fresh perspective, maybe seek some help or counsel. People who are generally managing their lives very well may not notice certain stresses or stressors building up and affecting them more than they think. They may not notice them until things start to seem a bit overwhelming or even a lot overwhelming. When this happens, they are going to need some serious stress relief. They will need to take some time to regain their balance and perspective. It is with this in mind that I offer these stress relief tips.
Stress Relief Tips
Live in Your Body – This may seem like a very odd stress relief tip because everyone lives in their own body, right? Some people don’t act like they do. You need to maintain your awareness of what is going on in your body. You need to own it and take care of it. Nurture your body so it can get you where you need to go. Some people get so caught up in what they are doing, that they forget about themselves: they don’t eat properly, they don’t go to the bathroom when they should because they’re ignoring the signals or trying to ignore them, they don’t take deep breaths, shift their position, or correct their posture when they really need to, and they don’t take frequent breaks to walk around and just relax when they are ultra-focused on a task. Remembering to take deep, relaxing breaths is an especially good stress reliever when you start to feel tension building. The corollary of “Live in your Body” is Continue reading →
Panic attacks are very frightening for anyone who has ever experienced one. I count myself among the people who have experienced one, so I know from firsthand experience as well as from my experience treating hundreds of patients in my office for panic attacks or panic disorder. In my case, I’ve had to deal with anxiety for most of my life, but I also experienced a full-blown panic attack in my early twenties, and struggled with the fear that it could happen again at any moment. Fortunately for me, it never did. That has not been the case for most sufferers of panic attacks, and certainly not for most of the people who I’ve seen in my office practice.
I felt a real kinship with panic sufferers and did all that I could to reassure them that they weren’t dying or suffering a heart attack and helped them to move beyond their constant fear and worry that another panic attack would strike them at any moment. I had an excellent track record treating panic disorder and panic attacks, but I did a lot of hand holding, building up people’s self-confidence, and I spent a lot of time educating people about their problem and teaching them relaxation techniques and also taught them to challenge their limiting beliefs about their own capabilities and what they could do to prevent and, if necessary, to abort their own panic attacks. I was proud of my patients for how well they did and proud of my track record of success with panic disorder patients and panic attack sufferers in general. But my ability to help people with panic attacks was limited to the people that I could see in my office. And it was limited to people who had health insurance that would cover their treatment for this problem, or to people who could afford to pay cash. At the very least, that would have cost them $1,000.00 for a few visits and treatment, but, more likely it would have run into several thousand dollars before my patients were cured of panic attacks for good. Some were quicker than others, but some people required several months or even years to be cured.
I wasn’t using NLP or Neurolinguistic Programming throughout most of my practice, so I wasn’t getting a lot of rapid permanent cures. I could have done better in a shorter period of time if I had been. Since I can’t help people one-on-one with Panic Disorder now, ever since I retired, I have been looking for a way to help people with this problem online. Even though I’m no longer practicing, there is the potential here to help a lot more people in this manner than I could in my private practice alone. I’ve searched for various solutions for chronic anxiety and panic disorder and have found some that run a few hundred dollars for some audios and videos. That really isn’t bad at all if they work well, but I kept looking for an extremely effective solution that wouldn’t cost quite that much. And I’m very pleased to report that I found a perfect solution for most people who suffer with panic attacks. It’s a rapid-cure reframing technique that has been helping thousands of people with Panic Attacks be cured permanently. It’s a Panic Attack Self Help program that has a much lower price point and gets results quicker than Continue reading →
One of the most important skills or talents to cultivate in order to manage your stress is “Self-Awareness.” Self-Awareness not in the sense of thinking about yourself a lot or looking at yourself in the mirror, but self-awareness as in being aware of whats going on inside your body, especially your emotions and your self-talk and how they are affecting your behavior, how you “are” in the world, or how you appear to others, and how you interact with other people in your life.
Many people operate on an almost unconscious basis in their everyday activities. We often get used to doing things in a certain way over and over, so we tend to “tune out” those activities and interactions with other people. If you’re not aware that Continue reading →
As a Family Physician for 26 years, I saw people of all ages presenting with every variety of problem for help, including diagnosis and treatment, but also comfort, reassurance, and regular doses of TLC. One thing that was very apparent to me was the role that Stress was playing in so many patients presenting symptoms and “medical problems.” I put medical problems in quotes because a lot of “medical problems” really aren’t, or they don’t need to be treated as medical problems. People are often driven to seek medical help for their symptoms because they are not managing their day-to-day stress in a healthy manner. I was able to help a lot of patients develop more effective strategies for managing their stress and reduce their symptoms and their doctor visits. Now I’m ready to share my knowledge and years of experience with you so that you can manage your stress more effectively and live a happier, more productive life once you know all the tried-and-true techniques of stress management. You may also find that you will be able to Continue reading →
