What is Stress and How Does it Affect Our Health?

With humans comes the inevitable.  No, not insanity, but close.  Stress!  Everyone has moments of stress, but it can be damaging if not controlled properly.  But in order to fix stress, we need to know what stress is.

What is Stress?

Stress is a physical and mental state caused by the failure of an organism to respond to threats (whether real or perceived).  It can be very damaging to your physical and psychological health long-term. 

Let’s dive into that definition a little more.  Threats can be physical or emotional, ranging anywhere from an illness, to an oncoming car, to the holding of a grudge.  It take a second to dodge an oncoming car, so that kind of threat is short lived and the stress is instantly relived.  But long-term stresses such as dissatisfaction with your job, relationship issues and financial issues, can keep the body in ‘high gear’ for weeks, months or years, wearing us out and breaking us down.

The 3 Stages of Stress

There are three recognized stages of stress. The first stage of stress is Alarm – the ‘fight or flight’ response.  The second is Resistance – where you work to overcome the threat.  The third is Exhaustion – caused by a failure to overcome the threat.  Failure in this sense can be disastrous to your body and mind if you hold onto a stressor long-term.  

How Stress Works

The first stage of stress is a trigger.  Stress can come from a shortage of food, a busy schedule, an insult from a friend.  This trigger creates an adrenaline response in us, sending us into ‘fight or flight’ mode.  However, stress often doesn’t go away after this fight or flight response.  Instead, it lingers into the second stage.

This second stage of resistance is when we try to adapt to the stress.  Say a friend calls us fat.  We get angry (releasing adrenaline) in response.  We then think about it over and over again, letting those words affect our emotions and release more adrenaline each time the memory is triggered.  After this period, if we don’t either confront the person (response) or join a gym and resolve to lose weight (adaptation), then we go into the third stage.

This third stage is exhaustion.  Rather than confronting the person, we let those words and the constant bursts of adrenaline/ anger that result, eat away at us, until we are too tired to deal with the person or go to the gym.  At this point, the stress has taken over and it can transition to affect our psychological or physical health, making us feel depressed or come down with a cold (physical illness) or making us become bitter (mental illness).

You can see how something so small can drastically influence our health.

Side Effects of Stress

Stress can result in a number of unhealthy consequences such as high levels of cortisol, depression, degraded immune system, impaired growth, slow healing times and much more.  In the long run, stress will start to affect your heart, putting undue hardship on your circulatory system.  Once this gets out of whack, your health is hard to maintain.

How to Stay Emotionally Fit When You’re Stressed

The first step in staying fit is to identify your stress.  Most of us know when we are stressed.  However, sometimes we don’t realize that our body is being negatively affected by it. 

For example, I had a kink in my neck for a couple months a few years back.  I thought it was because I worked out too much or was sleeping wrong.  I tried everything from massages to rest to discontinuing certain exercises.  Then one day I took my final exams that I had been studying for, and on the drive home, I could move my neck all around without pain.  Turns out, I was stressing all semester about the class, and had been holding all that stress-tension in my neck!

So, the signs may be there, but the causes may not be so obvious.  The trick is to pay attention to your body and mind on a daily basis.  If things feel off, from insomnia to back pain to headaches, maybe you are experiencing some form of stress.

Once you identify your stressors, try and find ways to reduce or eliminate them.  Oftentimes, a good night’s rest will be the cure for stress.  Other people reduce stress by going to see a movie, having a night out with friends, or booking a massage.  Exercise is the healthiest, cheapest and best form of stress relief, whether you try swimming, skiing, running or simply walking.  Exercise strengthens and tones our body and burns off stress-induced adrenaline, putting us in much better physical and mental shape.

If you have been feeling really awful lately, try seeing a professional such as a doctor or psychologist to uncover exactly what is stressing you out.

No matter how you look at it, reducing stress will keep you fit, both body and mind. Take a breath, get some rest, and enjoy life!

Article by:

K.W.