Do You Experience these Effects of Stress on Health and Body Weight?
Let’s take a look at the dire effects of stress on health and at how chronic stress contributes to your difficulty in losing weight. Later, we'll discuss some practical ideas for anxiety and stress management that you can apply immediately to release bottled up stress and stop accumulating body fat.
Impossible to ignore, stress effects body and mind more than you’ve ever imagined. These days, simply being alive and functioning is a sure recipe for high stress levels.
If you are like most people, every single day you get stressed out over deadlines, traffic jams, annoying noise, frustrating bosses, irritating colleagues, hassles big and small, and any number of regular stressors that are guaranteed to set your blood pressure soaring and your ears ringing, right?
Quite frankly, we have to put up with these daily stressors, hence the effects of stress on health. That’s why anxiety and stress management techniques are in such great demand - because, unfortunately, stress has become a way of life for most of us.
So how does excessive, prolonged stress affect health?
Well, you’ve probably heard that physiological effects of stress on health, especially from long term and high stress levels, are downright disastrous. It's true. Your mind and your body end up paying a huge toll for the high-powered lifestyle. The effects of stress on your body leave you feeling overwhelmed and sapped.
Believe it or not, stress is simply your body's instinctive, automatic response to any kind of (perceived) threat, attack or harm.
Overly simplified, your nervous system is hard-wired to cope with any kind of threat by releasing instantly fight-or-flight stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol in your blood stream, to get your body "ready" for whatever emergency action might be necessary to protect you from the perceived harm.
Effects of Stress on Health: Short term vs. Long term Stress
You should know that a small dose of stress effects body positively, helping you focus and perform better, even acting as a motivational force.
On short term, physiological effects of stress include increased heart rate and blood pressure, accelerated breathing, dilatation of pupils, sharpening of the sight; blood is forced away from the digestive tract towards the limbs, muscles tighten up, perception of pain diminishes, and so on.
Although this short term response to threatening events are meant to increase your strength, stamina and reflexes in case you have to fight a bear or escape from it, long term, constant elevated stress levels cause a lot of harm to your system.
You can't flee.
You can't fight.
You have to "control yourself" and "deal with it".
The bad news is that continuous bottled up stress leads to eating disorders as well, another major reason you’re unable to lose weight.
One of the main causes of modern ills - hypertension, obesity, diabetes - the...
...Effects of Stress on Health and Our Daily Performance...
...can’t be ignored. The brain, immune system, heart and metabolism are all dramatically affected by the physiological effects of stress. Take a look:
Brain: long term stress affects brain functioning through the continuous release of cortisol – a condition known as adrenal fatigue. High cortisol levels impair neuron activity causing irreversible damage: short-term memory, clarity of mind, judgment, learning ability are all dramatically affected
Immune System: the effects of stress on health include the suppression of the immune system, which opens the door to a great number of opportunistic infections
Cardiovascular: Increased adrenalin causes a spike in the heart rate and blood pressure increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke
Metabolism: The chances of experiencing symptoms like thyroid dysfunction, low metabolic rate, diabetes, syndrome X, are increased manifold with high levels of long term stress
