What is stress, and why should we care about it?
We’ve all heard that stress kills. This phrase is used so many times that it has become a cliché. You know, one of those sayings you’re sick and tired of hearing because everyone says it all the time, but nobody knows what it means. Usually, things become clichés because they carry a significant amount of truth. So why should we care about stress?
Stress doesn’t directly cause death. Short bursts of stress are helpful and necessary for our survival. Stress is our body’s natural response to either internal or external events. Its primary purpose is to prepare us for action.
The problem arises when we are under chronic stress. Our bodies and minds are not designed to experience stress for long periods of time because it requires a lot of energy.
When the stress response is activated, your body thinks you are under attack. In order to prepare you for action, it redirects all your energy from your vital organs to your action centers. Your heart starts beating faster, pumping more and more blood into your muscles and taking it away from your digestive system, immune system, and natural repair system. This is why stress is associated with high muscle tension, elevated heart rate, and stomach cramps.
Since all of your energy goes towards your muscles, your body’s natural defense and repair systems dramatically slow down and even stops working in some extreme cases. Our immune system shuts down during stress. We don’t produce enough white blood cells, so we cannot fight viruses and diseases. We also don’t digest food properly, so even if we are healthy eaters; our body may not have enough energy to extract all those beneficial vitamins, proteins, and nutrients. You can be eating the most nutritious food in the world, but if you are under chronic stress, your body cannot process all that good stuff properly.
In nature, stress isn’t triggered very often and is very short-lived. In the human world, we encounter dozens of stress triggers daily. One of the leading causes of stress is our over-consuming lifestyle. We overeat, over-drink, overbuy and overstimulate ourselves with information through all of our senses. This physical and mental overload puts a tremendous amount of stress on our bodies. Another significant cause of stress is our mental activity. In other words, our thoughts. We constantly think about bills, social expectations, news, work emails, traffic jams, social media, family drama, people’s opinions, and so on. Living under chronic stress becomes our norm. It’s like flooring the gas pedal of your car nonstop. After living like this for years and even decades, we develop all kinds of chronic illnesses.
Chronis stress = Chronis diseases.
7 out of 10 people die from chronic diseases, most of which are caused by chronic stress. All we have to do to prevent these deaths is to learn how to redirect our energy. Our bodies can heal themselves from any disease, and our immune system can protect us against any virus, but only if we give them a chance by learning how to shorten our stress response to a minimum.
What are the main takeaways:
• Our overconsuming lifestyle and our repetitive thought patterns keep us in a never-ending cycle of stress.
• When we are in stress mode, our immune system, digestive system, and natural repair system do not work correctly.
• As a result, our bodies never get a chance to repair themselves. Our digestive system doesn’t have enough energy to pull good nutrients from the food we eat, and our immune system shuts down and is unable to fight off viruses.
• Chorin diseases are a result of our body’s inability to repair itself dues to chronic stress.
• If we learn how to identify and shorten our bodies’ stress response, we can boost our immune system and prevent or even reverse diseases that kill us.
If you found this article helpful, please consider reading my next article, where I will talk about ways you can learn how your body and mind react to stress.
