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How Does Stress Affect Health We’ve all experienced stress. But what is it exactly? How does stress affect health? What happens in your body when you are experiencing stress? How do those physical processes influence your health and vulnerability to illness? What can you do to manage the effects of it? These are some of the questions I hope to answer for you. The Stress Response What do you think of when you think of stress? Perhaps your financial worries, relationships, work or family pressures spring to mind. Now think for a moment as an animal. Say for example, you’re a little white-tailed deer. Your concerns as a deer are predators, starvation, and injury rather than how you’ll save for retirement.Animals also have to deal with chronic physical stressors, for example drought, pest infestations that eradicate crops, flood, and famine. The body responds to these fairly well too. There is a third category as well, psychological and social. Psychological and Social Stress As humans, we are intelligent enough to be able to excite the body’s stress-response without moving a muscle, and without being in any immediate physical danger. We can sit still playing a game, or better yet watching a football game, and engage the stress response, and all we have to do is think of the IRS or that upcoming appraisal at work and we can engage a similar response to that deer running from the cougar.For humans, a stressor is not just something that knocks us out of balance, such as an injury or illness, but it can also be the anticipation of something happening long in the future. Our experiences are full of psychological and social stressors. As we stew for months over our in-laws impending visit, our upcoming move, or the inevitability of death, we can trigger the stress-response whether it is necessary or not. Our expectations of future harm can assist us in chronically triggering the body to act in emergency mode. An important point is that stress-related diseases arise from activating the stress-response, which has been designed for short term emergencies, on a long term basis.How does stress affect health? In essence, the response that is meant to help us survive can also make us sick. The term ‘stress’, was used by Hans Selye in the 1930s to explain what he saw in rats in his laboratory. Selye was a professor of endocrinology, a branch of medicine that deals with the hormones in the body. As he started his career, he discovered something very interesting, that the body has a general response to physical challenges. This was contradictory to what else was known about physical adaptations, that the body has specific responses to specific problems. The specific responses are rather obvious. On a hot summer day, you’re at the beach, lying in the sun, and you begin to sweat. On a cold winter day, you head out into the icy air and you begin to shiver. The body, logically, has different responses to different situations. So then what is this idea of a general response to stress? Fight or Flight This general non-specific response is also known as the “fight or flight” response, a phrase which was coined in 1815 by Walter Cannon, the godfather of stress physiology (who probably also first used the word as a medical term – before that it was only used in engineering).It makes sense if you think about the fact that in order to respond to intense physical stressors, the body may need some of the same things, regardless of what it is. For example, the body needs energy. One of the most important parts of the stress-response is the transformation of energy from stored energy (sugars, proteins and fats in your cells) to energy ready to use by the appropriate muscles. In order to deliver this newly mobilized energy, as well as necessary oxygen and nutrients, breathing rate, blood pressure and heart rate all increase. In addition, the body ceases long-term projects so it can focus all of its resources on short term survival. If a hurricane is approaching you aren’t going to start remodeling the kitchen. You focus on getting through the emergency first. How does stress affect health? Well, your body reorganizes its priorities, hindering growth, digestion, reproduction, and immunity. If you’re not sure you’re going to make it through the next few minutes, you don’t want to put energy into processing food that will be used in hours, or growing or repairing damage to cells that will be helpful weeks from now. Similarly, reproduction takes a huge amount of resources so is low on the priority list when you’re facing imminent danger. Under the influence of stress, sex drive decreases. Men have troubles with erections and testosterone secretion, and women are less likely to ovulate and more likely to miscarry if they do conceive. The body also focuses less energy on defending itself against bacteria, viruses and cancerous cells that might cause trouble in a couple weeks or a year from now. Cognitive and sensory skills are also adjusted, for example memory improves and senses sharpen. All of these physical responses to emergency are very useful in helping us survive. Why and how does stress affect health? Stress can make us sick Hans Selye, the endocrinologist I mentioned before, discovered some interesting things while experimenting with rats. He was attempting to find out what a particular extract from ovaries did to the body, so he injected rats with the substance daily. Some months into this experiment, Selye noticed that the rats who he had injected with the hormone had enlarged adrenal glands, peptic ulcers, and smaller immune tissues. He also noticed that control rats that had pure saline injected instead of the hormone, also had the same problems. If both the control rats and the injected rats had the same results, then what was going on? He thought about what they had in common. All of the rats underwent trauma while Selye, who was less than competent at the injection process, dropped them, chased them, and injected them daily. He theorized that the rats were undergoing some sort of non-specific response to the hassles. To test this, he put some rats in very cold temperatures and some in hot temperatures, some through surgery and others through intense exercise. He found the same results in all of these groups of rats; ulcers, enlarged adrenal glands, and immune system atrophy. He was the first person to observe illnesses caused by “stress”. The question is why does the stress response make us sick? Well, if you think about all of the things that happen during stress, it’s easy to see that they are completely inefficient, shortsighted and energy-wise very costly. If you’re funneling your savings into your daily needs then you’ll never have any money to put into long term projects. Also, the body has a way of balancing itself, but stress takes it way out of balance so bringing it back to normal takes a lot of effort. Imagine a pendulum. If it swings far to one direction it will then swing far in the other direction and it will take some time to settle in the middle. Or think of a seesaw with a Sumo wrestler on either end. Balancing the seesaw takes more energy for the wrestlers than it would for a couple of 3 year olds. The wrestlers may also damage the seesaw because of their size. It might also be really hard to get off the seesaw, because of their weight, and they may cause other damage in the process. The weight of stress is similarly hard on the body as it tries to balance itself.
The main problem though is when we consistently turn on the stress-response or we can’t turn it off. An important thing to remember is that although it can make us susceptible to disease, it doesn’t automatically lead to illness. There is some good news in here! Think, you and your coworker might have had the same disease but had completely different experiences and results, or maybe you and your partner both were exposed to the same virus but only one of you experienced symptoms. Some of the variation has to do with genetics but a lot has to do with other factors. Click Here! to check out some of the things you can do in order to interrupt the process that turns stressors into illness. How does stress affect health? Read on to learn more.
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