SURVIVING STRESS
We live in a world where chronic stress affects pretty much everyone, whether we realize it or not. One of the most important things to understand when we start to address stress management is the difference between acute stress and chronic stress.
Acute stress is stress that only affects us for a short amount of time. We are physiologically very well equipped to handle acute stress- stressor affects us, we have a stress response and deal with the stressor, stressor ends, and we rest and recover. This is what most of us term a fight or flight response. And this mode of dealing with stress is EXTREMELY efficient when dealing with very short term, infrequent stressors, say being chased by a bear, stepping into traffic and narrowly being missed by a car driving by. We’ve all felt that adrenaline rush, noticed the shaking of our hands, racing heart, maybe some queasiness in our stomach. All of those reactions are due to changes that take place in different body systems when our sympathetic nervous system takes over. The sympathetic nervous system is the part of our nervous system that dominates when we are in fight or flight mode.
So if acute stress is the sympathetic nervous system taking over for a short term response, what is chronic stress? It’s essentially the same thing- the sympathetic nervous system takes over, and our body experiences all of the same physiological changes that it would during a fight or flight response. The difference is that when we are under chronic stress, the sympathetic nervous system never backs off. It may slow its response to a degree or back off for a short time, but a body in chronic stress is more or less ALWAYS in sympathetic system dominance.
The reason this happens is that our bodies are genetically hardwired to treat all stress the same way, whether it's physical stress from a car accident, or chronic stress due to financial concerns. Our stress response has evolved with us, and if we trace our ancestry back just a few hundred or thousand years, we as a human race weren’t really under chronic stress. We definitely had acute stressors- being chased by potential predators, warring with neighboring tribes, hunting our next meal. But we weren’t living in a world where we were constantly exposed to small stressors- confrontations on the internet, financial struggles, getting cut off in traffic, marital issues, you get the idea.
Let’s talk about what happens during a stress response, so that we have a better understanding of why it’s so important that we don’t constantly exist in this state.
If we only experience stress acutely and have time to recover from the effects, this is a great system. Unfortunately, we live in an era of chronic stress, and the reality is that we are not biologically well-adapted at dealing with the repercussions this can have long term.
Several things happen during a sympathetic stress response. Sympathetic nerves affect almost every organ and tissue in your body in order to help you handle emergencies. This is why we see the heart rate increase in order to increase blood flow, sweat to cools you, bladder and digestion halt because they aren’t as important during an emergency.
Your endocrine system is also involved in a stress response, as it helps control body functions by releasing hormones and other messengers that influence metabolism and other processes.
During an emergency, both the nervous and endocrine systems activate your adrenal glands, which release cortisol and adrenaline. These two hormones trigger physiological responses that are grouped under the fight or flight response.
Blood pressure rises because the vessels of the internal organs and skin shrink, and those of the muscles dilate. When vessels shrink, healthy blood flow is not delivered. Consider what happens when we have chronically low blood flow being delivered to our organs, particularly our liver. This is the organ responsible for creating healthy cholesterol levels, for our phase 1 and phase 2 detoxification, for creating bile for digestion and detoxification...that's a pretty short list of what the liver does. Skin health is something we can visibly see with decreased blood flow- acne, dry skin, flaky skin, etc.
Having endorphins released may sound good to some of us, but think about what happens when we are in the rest and relax phase- these neurons build back up a storage of endorphins for later release. When we are never in a fully relaxed state, as is the case with chronic stress, we don't have a constant supply of endorphins nor the capacity to continually create more. So eventually we run out and begin to see what is described as psychological symptoms- crankiness, sadness, anxiety, restlessness, feeling wired but tired.
The liver begins to break down glycogen and release it as sugar into the bloodstream. If we need that extra boost of energy because we are going to be physically exerting ourselves this is great. But it’s clear that we don't want excess sugar being released into our bloodstream if it's not going to be utilized. When it's not used, which it isn’t during times of chronic stress, we end up having to release more insulin to clear it from our system again. This is one step in building an insulin resistance and eventually Type 2 Diabetes.
The implications of digestion slowing or ceasing on a chronic basis are far reaching. Typical digestion from one end to the other should be between 12 and 36 hours. When digestion slows, we are at risk for malabsorption of nutrients due to inappropriate food breakdown, we are at risk of developing SIBO due to a backup of bacteria from the colon to the small intestine, we are at risk of constipation and thus re-absorbing toxins that our body is attempting to eliminate. Pair this with the decreased liver function we just spoke about and we're setting ourselves up for toxin overload.
The pancreas functions both as a digestive organ, but also as an endocrine organ. It releases both insulin and digestive enzymes. Remember in times of high stress the liver is releasing sugar for energy, but when we don't actually need that sugar, we need insulin to pull it out of our blood stream. Yet here we are also cuing our pancreas to slow down the release of insulin. So blood sugar remains high, and we aren’t offering up enough digestive enzymes to break down the food we’re eating, which can lead to food sensitivities and gut inflammation when paired with slowed gut motility.
The spleen is something we don’t often think about in regards to stress, but it’s important too. In addition to releasing extra RBC in times of need, the spleen stores our WBC, acts as a filter for the immune system, and plays an important role in fighting certain types of bacterial infections- especially bacteria that are known to cause pneumonia and meningitis. A spleen that is chronically overworked by high stress won't be able to attend to its other important functions, and this leaves us vulnerable to illness.