How stress affects the body - Sharon Horesh Berkist

[Lord777]

Stress is an innate physical response that travels throughout the body. In the short term, stress can even be beneficial.

Shaking before your exam? Not enough time to complete the task? When you face a difficult task, you get stressed. Stress is not just a feeling. Stress is an innate physical response that travels throughout the body. In the short term, stress can even be beneficial.

However, when stress is your frequent companion, the basic instinct to "run or fight" not only changes your mind, it damages many other organs and cells throughout the body. The adrenal glands secrete stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, and norepinephrine. These hormones travel through the bloodstream and travel quickly to the heart through the blood vessels.

Adrenaline makes your heart beat faster, which increases blood pressure and can cause hypertension over time. Cortisol can also damage the endothelium, the layer of cells that lines the inner surface of blood vessels. Scientists now know that this is the first step towards atherosclerosis, or the appearance of cholesterol plaques in the arteries.

All of these changes increase the likelihood of a heart attack or stroke. When the brain recognizes stress, it activates your autonomic nervous system. Through this system of nerve endings, the brain transmits a stress signal to the intestinal nervous system.

In addition to the butterfly effect in the abdomen, the nervous regulation of the digestive system can disrupt the rhythm of contractions that propel food through the digestive tract, leading to irritable bowel syndrome and can increase the stomach's sensitivity to acid, increasing the likelihood of heartburn ...

Through the gut nervous system, stress alters the composition and function of gut bacteria, which can affect the digestive system and overall health. Speaking of digestion, does chronic stress affect your waistline? In general, yes. Cortisol can increase your appetite.

He tells the body to replenish energy reserves with high-calorie and high-carbohydrate foods, so you gorge on ice cream and cakes. High cortisol levels also increase the layer of visceral fat that surrounds our internal organs.

This type of fat doesn't just make you bigger. It actively releases hormones and a chemical from the immune system, a cytokine. All of these can increase the risk of developing chronic diseases such as heart disease and insulin resistance. In this case, stress hormones affect immune cells in different ways. They help the body fight off hostile bacteria and heal.

But chronic stress can weaken the functioning of immune cells, making you more susceptible to infections and slowing down the healing process. Would you like to live a long life? You may need to curb your stress to do this. After all, stress also affects telomeres - the genetic structure that protects the ends of chromosomes and determines the age of the cell.

Telomeres cover chromosomes, which allows the preservation of DNA data during cell division without damaging the genetic code; the telomere layer contracts with each cell division. If the telomeres are too short, the cell cannot divide and dies.

And that is not all. Chronic stress can undermine your health in many ways, causing acne, hair loss, sexual dysfunction, headaches, muscle stiffness, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, and irritability.

So what does this mean to you? Life will always be full of stressful situations. But what matters to your brain and your entire body is how you react to them. See them as problems that you can control, not as an insurmountable threat. This way you can work more efficiently and stay healthy longer.

 

[CarderPlanet]

Preventing stress and frustration

Many of us are familiar with this state of tension in any business, be it work or family relationships, when you constantly keep something in mind, trying to decide something, fixated on the result and simply are not able to relax.

A person becomes dependent on certain processes, and in attempts to keep everything under his control, aggression, anger or even attacks of acute mental states arise. This occurs when you become obsessed with some idea and in the constant fuss, you simply lose touch with your body and soul.

And the real reason for everything is that you have not learned to develop and work in a comfortable schedule, you have not learned to live the joys of all spheres of life in harmony, and most likely you do not devote any time to communicating with inspiring people who contribute to your spiritual comfort. You need to understand that if you overextend yourself somewhere, lose control of your time, you begin to gradually heat up, and most often this leads to an emotional explosion, which has a destructive effect not only on you, but also on your entire environment. You may simply not notice how you offend your friends, colleagues or loved ones. Therefore, you need to create for yourself such a schedule and format of life so that when you return to work, you do not have a desire to drain all the accumulated negativity on your relatives and friends, you do not have a feeling that you are angry with everyone.

Such states must be caught and, if possible, pulled out of them by the realization that you are "creating" now. Healthy infantilism helps in this, the state in which you playfully, like a child, relate to life, so to speak, start the mode of "background childishness", when you easily relate to any inconsistencies and with the same ease let go of the various processes of your life.