About the Stress Response
Stress manifests with a variety of changes in your body. These include changes in breathing, heart rate, blood flow and pressure, muscle tension, immune activity, hormonal, metabolic, mental and emotional changes. The mental and physical changes that occur with stress comprise the stress response, and the stress response is controlled by the bodies' autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system is designed to respond to a threat by triggering fight or flight. Fight or flight is a primitive response that was very helpful to our ancesters when they needed to escape from vicious predators.
The problem is that although our nervous systems haven't changed much over time, our stressors sure have. Most of us can live our entire lifetimes without being chased by a tiger, but we experience smaller stressors, they occur many times each day and each one triggers our stress response. Chronic stress causes our nervous systems to become overloaded and unbalanced and can affect our health, mental and emotional state, relationships, and effectiveness and performance.
You don't have to feel "stressed out" to be experiencing the impact of stress on your ability to function optimally. Years of mild stress or chronic worrying can cause your physiology to be subtly out of balance. The damage can be slowly occurring behind the scenes.
Illnesses that have been related to or are impacted by chronic stress include heart disease, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, sleep disturbances, some forms of chronic pain, and asthma. Stress is associated with fertility problems; stress makes it difficult to lose weight and also reduces our ability to heal and recover from illness or injury.
Psychologically, when we're stressed we feel out of control, helpless, depressed or anxious. Our thinking becomes unclear or we may find ourselves "locked onto" negative thoughts. We lose our ability to cope with everyday problems and are even less prepared to cope with life's inevitable curve balls.
The bottom line is that in order to function effectively, efficiently and enjoy optimal health, we need our autonomic nervous systems to be in balance and well toned.
