Stress is more than an emotion

 With the number of people in today's climate experiencing chronic stress or burnout and the growing number of people facing a variety of health issues, I thought it was important to point out the mind-body connection. Yes, just as your brain feels stress, so does your body.

Stress happens, and it isn’t always bad. It can be handy for a burst of extra energy when you're playing a competitive sport, planning a wedding, or starting a new job, which are all, usually positive things. In the short term, acute stress can be positive, but when stressors are activated for too long and too often, this psychological anguish not only changes your brain but can also cause harm to you physically.

Stress is more than just an emotion, it’s a physical response that travels throughout your entire body.

Stress begins with the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis, a series of interactions between endocrine glands in the brain and the kidney. Once the brain has detected stress, the HPA axis is activated and your adrenal glands release the stress hormones, cortisol, and adrenaline into your bloodstream, reaching your blood vessels and heart - triggering a reaction we know as the fight or flight response.

For people who experience chronic stress, their HPA axis is likely to be running for long periods of time, if not constantly - causing perpetually high cortisol levels. Too much cortisol can cause malfunction of the inner lining of blood vessels, which has been proven to trigger cholesterol plaque build-up in your arteries and could increase your chances of heart attack or stroke.

When your brain senses stress it affects our limbic system which is essentially a guide to our emotions. This then activates our autonomic nervous system which has two main drivers, the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) and the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). Through this network, our brain communicates stress to our intestinal nervous system, which again, releases cortisol and adrenaline that travels through our bloodstream.

So what does this mean? Well, besides causing that feeling we know as butterflies or a nervous stomach, which is actually your digestive muscles contracting and blood in the intestine constricting; Disturbing the natural rhythmic contractions through this brain-gut connection affects the movement of food through your gut which can lead to irritable bowel syndrome. This slowing down of the guts transit system can also change the composition and function of your gut bacteria, keeping food, toxins and wastes sitting in there, which can lead to inflammation, weakening of the intestinal permeability, leaky gut, and increased gut sensitivity to acid (making you more likely to experience heartburn), and ultimately may affect your overall health.

So where does your body get the energy to activate all these responses, it has to come from somewhere right?

Yes, that’s where our trusty immune system comes in. When our stress response is continuously using resources from our immune system, this causes the function of our immune cells to slow down. Therefore, stopping it from making as many infection and disease-fighting white blood cells as it should be. This makes us more vulnerable to infections and slows down our healing process.

If reading this blog has made you feel even more stressed about being stressed, don’t worry…

The best way to stay healthy is to eliminate chronic stress, which yes, is easier said than done. So, if you can’t exactly get rid of it completely, there are things we can do to manage it.

Physical exercise - This doesn’t mean running a marathon. Walking just three times a week for 45 minutes can do the trick.

 Daily meditation and relaxation therapies can help lower your stress response.  

Sleep well – Prioritise getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night.

Eat well – lots of fruit and vegetable, lots of healthy fats, omega threes and fatty acids.

Positive reframing – Try to change the way you think about stressful situations. Try to view these as something that is under your control rather than overwhelming threats. Also, try to think of these situations as a challenge to overcome rather than a threat. Lowing perceived stress can also reduce the physical response and impact.

 Written by Summer Humberstone

Student of Kelly Hope

Brzozowski, B., Mazur-Bialy, A., Pajdo, R., Kwiecien, S., Bilski, J., Zwolinska-Wcislo, M., Mach, T., & Brzozowski, T. (2016). Mechanisms by which Stress Affects the Experimental and Clinical Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD): Role of Brain-Gut Axis. Current neuropharmacology, 14(8), 892–900. https://doi.org/10.2174/1570159x14666160404124127

Rankin, L. (2013). Mind over medicine: scientific proof that you can heal yourself. NSW Hay House Australia

Van der Kolk, B. A., McFarlane, A. C., & Weisæth, L. (1996). Traumatic stress: the effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body, and society. Guilford Press.