What Does Stress Do To My Body?

Here are some crazy stress facts

The lowest stress levels are recorded in adults older than 72
80% of millennials are stressed about money
Teenagers report a stress level of 5.8 out of 10 during the school year
One in five college students has thought about suicide
83% of Americans are worried about the future of the nation
Nearly 25% of people report feeling extreme stress during the holidays
45% of college students seek counseling due to stress
Around 70% of students are often or always stressed about schoolwork
About 14% of US citizens exercise regularly to handle stress
Stress is controlled by your nervous system
Stress can cause headaches
Stress causes muscular aches and tightness
Stress can impact mental performance
Stress can keep you from sleeping at night

You are reading this and everything is quiet, life is good and you are fully relaxed. Now what would happen if a massive roaring lion jumped in the room…? Obviously, you are not going to nap, check your posture,or wonder what is for dinner. There's a lion in the room…

Now, our bodies work the same way. In our bodies there are various bodily systems: muscular, pain, sleep, immune, nerves, reproductive, digestive etc... When your body is not perceiving a threat and everything is good, your body’s systems are in balance (homeostasis).

However, when a big threatening lion jumps in the room to eat you, your systems prioritize survival and your body's natural balance is disrupted. You are wide awake, ready to run or fight, and tasks like healing and digestion are put on the back burner. This is normal and happens to all of us. Think about the last time you were afraid and how your body responded…?

Luckily, a zoo keeper comes by and removes the lion in the room. The threat is gone, you can let out a sigh of relief and start to calm down and relax again. Your body’s systems will relax and the balance will be restored.

Let’s talk about what happened when the lion came into the room.

The stress response that would happen with your body is fight, flight or freeze. This response comes from a part of your nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system. Your body is wired this way to help you escape a threat, and it signals different areas of your body to be prepared to act to get you away from the stressor, aka a lion in this case.

These are the areas that get activated to help you get away from the lion:

Adrenal glands
Heart Rate
Muscles
Language
Breathing
You become alert
Loss of reproductive interest
Immune system shuts down temporarily

Now what does this have to do with your health and even pain levels? Ongoing stress or pain causes the same response as a big roaring lion coming into your room. The large majority of us have a lion following us around all the time…

Work stress
Financial stress
Family/relationship stress
Anxiety and fear
Health issues
Health issues with different explanations of pain from different people, social media, doctors etc...
Previous failed treatment attempts
Other constant perceived stresses

New stress of any kind causes a response controlled, primarily, by a hormone that is released called adrenaline. We typically think of this stress coming from a more serious situation like below:

Combat
Surgery
Litigation *slip and fall cases at work etc...
Car wrecks

Now what would happen if the lion was never removed from the room? What happens to you when stress does not go away like what we all experience in our fast paced society? Our body moves past the adrenaline hormone mentioned above and moves to a new hormone to regulate the long term stress response called cortisol.

What causes the stress hormone cortisol to be released?

Stress of any kind
Depression
Illness
Injury
Fear
Surgery
Pain

Cortisol plays a role in all of these things:

Initially cortisol helps you regulate your body’s stress response
Help control your body’s use of fats, proteins and carbohydrates, or your metabolism
Regulating blood pressure
Regulating blood sugar
Helping control your sleep-wake cycle
Short and long term memories creation
Ability to learn

Eventually what happens when cortisol has been released for long periods of time is

Appetite changes leading to weight gain, especially in your face and abdomen
Fatty deposits between your shoulder blades
Wide, purple stretch marks on your abdomen (belly)
Muscle weakness in your upper arms and thighs
Muscle wasting
High blood sugar, which often turns into Type 2 diabetes
High blood pressure (hypertension)
Excessive hair growth (hirsutism) in people assigned female at birth
Weak bones (osteoporosis) and fractures
Reproductive issues
Weakens your immune system

How does cortisol specifically affect my chronic pain?

Body aches all over, tissues have increased sensitivity
Bowel and bladder issues
Decreases your body's ability to produce inflammation
Decreases blood flow
Delays tissue healing
Even though it stops inflammation production it can leave inflammation in an area due to other mechanisms

As it turns out, there’s a link between pain and cortisol from stress as well

Fibromyalgia
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Chronic Lyme's Disease
Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity

Now, how does a daily stressor cause physical stress and damage to our bodies?
When our body experiences a stressful event and it starts to present as a physical illness the way this happens can be explained through the general adaptation syndrome.
The three stages of GAS are:

Alarm reaction
Resistance
Exhaustion

Alarm reaction stage
A stress signal is sent to a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus enables the release of hormones, mainly, adrenaline and cortisol. This process happens outside of your control by an automatic part of your nervous system (autonomic nervous system) called the sympathetic or the fight or flight system we described last week. This is preparing you to fight or flight away from the stressor.

Resistance
Next the body tries to balance the changes that happened during the alarm reaction stage (remember homeostasis we talked about). Now this is still happening mostly outside of your control with the autonomic system, except this time it is controlled by the parasympathetic system (this is nicknamed the rest and digest response). This system is trying to lower the amount of cortisol produced, and bring the heart rate and blood pressure back to normal. If the stressful situation comes to an end during this reaction the body will return to normal. Now when the lion is still in the room the body will stay in a state of alert, and stress hormones continue to be produced.

Exhaustion stage
After an extended period of stress the body has depleted its energy resources by continually trying but failing to recover from the initial alarm reaction stage. This is where you will experience everything we listed above.

When you add all of this up and think about the response stress is causing us to feel constantly it is easy to see how the body can become overwhelmed and lose its ability to maintain balance.

Chronic Stress Causes You To Have
Mood swings
Problems sleeping
Fatigue
Sore and sensitive muscles, joints, bones etc…
Memory changes
Low libido

Eventually you can get stress-related health conditions

Heart disease
Asthma
Obesity
Diabetes
Headaches
Depression
Gastrointestinal diseases
Alhziemer's disease
Accelerated aging
Premature Death
Chronic Pain

Now what would you do if a lion cub came into the room and you did not have a fear of lions? You would not freak out and you may even want to pet it. What am I getting at? With smaller threats your body's chemical stress systems do not need to be activated or ramped up. We will teach you below things you can do to make your stress manageable.

When you start these strategies again you will start to notice

Increased