Throughout the year we experience prolonged stress. Whether its cause lies in our job or in our personal life, is less important. The effect is that our immunity lowers and starts to break. So, what is the stress effect on health?
The mechanism
Experiencing stress for a couple of minutes leads to cortisol release. Cortisol is a hormone that once released, it starts to reduce any body process that is not considered “essential”. Unfortunately, digestion and the immune system are among those processes.
The brain perceives stress as a life threat. Therefore it starts to operate in survival mode. When your life is threatened, digesting food is not a priority anymore, nor fighting bacteria and viruses.
Cortisol naturally increases also in severe disease like cancers or thyroid disorders, but also in depression, insomnia and chronic fatigue. Prolonged exposure to high levels of cortisol not only breaks down the immune system, but it’s also damaging to brain cells. First area hit is the hippocampus which deals with memory and the learning process. Read again the last sentence and you will understand why studying under pressure, one day before the exam, rarely works.
Another stress effect on health is that indirectly, it can lead to obesity. That is rather due to compulsive eating during stressful times.
Exposure to stress for more than 10 to 20 minutes will lead to an adrenaline discharge. That will make you heart rate accelerate, increase the intake of oxygen and also raise your temperature and blood sugar. Your body starts to operate in overdrive mode.
In the end with stress comes insomnia. Sleep is one of the strongest tools your body has to self-regulate, heal and recover. In another article linked here, we discussed how sleep affects performance.
I bet you didn’t know this
The human brain cannot distinguish between imagination and reality. If you are picturing stressful situations or keep ruminating over something stressful, you brain will order the release of cortisol and adrenaline. Just as if you were actually living what you are imagining.
The brain is still trying to operate in your best interest. If your senses have perceived a threat, he’s trying to supply you with the needed resources to fight it or flee away from danger.
Summing up the above think of the effect of a one hour stressful meeting. Or even worrying about it the night before. All this can lead in the end to anixety, general anxiety and somatizations, but that’s not the focus of our discussion.
Imagine that in the middle of a pandemic when your immune system needs to operate at top parameters, you are constantly worrying about your job. What do you think it will happen?
What’s left to do?
First, you have to identify your stressors and realistically assess the situation. Being stressed over losing your job while you have a whole familly to feed is something you can’t ignore. The question is: are you really at risk of losing your job or is it just a projection of your mind? The result of your own imagination based on fear and overthinking. Do you have solid evidence that supports your reasoning?
If on the other hand, what makes you agitated is the impostor syndrome or agoraphobia or something literally benign like holding a presentation, the root cause lies somewhere else. It would be in your best interest to get to the bottom of it and solve it through therapy.
A second thing you can do is to try to naturally raise your happiness hormones as they are inhibitors of cortisol. You can read more about it in this article.
Last, but not least, people that don’t care that much about life in general tend to live longer. Sometimes even happier. That is because, in their case, the stress effect on health is low. Try to focus less on the end result, more on the journey and most of all on the company you have on that journey.
