What Stress Does to Your Body

Anyone dealing with stress will know that it can have some pretty significant physical and emotional effects. What you may be less familiar with is why this happens and exactly what stress does to your body. 

The Stress Response

When your body senses a “threat”, it releases stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline. This sets in motion physical changes, within your body.

From an evolutionary perspective, this gave our ancestors the best chance of survival against threats.

The problem is, most of us are not running from danger, yet we frequently experience this “fight or flight” reaction throughout our daily lives.

Because unfortunately, your body does a poor job of distinguishing between life-threatening events and day-to-day stressful situations.

Your body can’t tell if you are being chased by a saber tooth tiger or stuck in traffic while running late for an appointment! The physiology of the body reacts the same.

We feel “stressed out” all the time! Jobs, family, kids, finances, traffic; we’re always on the go, trying to “do it all”.

As a society, we are so used to ‘being stressed’ that we actually see it as normal. Unfortunately, this chronic stress takes a toll on our health and overall wellbeing.

Let’s look at a few common symptoms of stress and why they occur:

• Racing heart – Ever feel like your heart is pounding out of your chest? Stress hormones encourage your heart to beat a little bit faster so that blood can get to organs and limbs more quickly. Over time, chronic stress can raise your blood pressure. 

• Rapid breathing – As well as increasing your heart rate, your body also increases respiration to give an energy and oxygen boost.

• Dilated pupils – Your pupils may get more dilated to allow more light to get to your eyes. For our ancestors, this would have meant a better chance of surviving life or death threats!

• Brain fog and focus issues – For our ancestors, the brain needed to focus solely on the “threat” in question and this can result in brain fog, poor memory and poor cognition in general. 

• Digestion and immunity slow down to allow energy to be be focused on essential processes for survival. Chronic stress can cause digestive problems and lower your immunity. 

Stress can contribute to heartburn, sleep problems, anxiety, depression, stomach upset, IBS or constipation, decrease cognition and impact fertility.

It can impact our ability to interact with others, potentionally taking a toll on relationships.

Long-term chronic stress can lead to chronic health conditions such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, and autoimmune disease. Quite literally, chronic stress deeply impact your overall quality of life and can take years off your life.

What can help

There are many stress management techniques that may help, including meditation and breath work, or journaling. Depending on what is contributing to your stress, it may be helpful to reach out to a therapist for professional help, or to work with health coach to explore integrating stress management techniques into your life.