Shocking! This Is What Happens To Your Hormones And Overall Health When You Feel Stressed

Your brain does a poor job at protecting you during stress. Yet we can’t eliminate stress because that is your body’s reacting to an unfavorable situation – either happening or about to happen – and any kind of discomfort.

We get stressed because we don’t anticipate things will turn out bad. So, when things get messy, or a little different from what we had expected, we feel threatened. And the result is what psychologists call, “flight or fight.”

Fight or Flight: Understanding How Stress Occurs

A looming deadline to submit an assignment given to you by your boss – whose judgment we fear – might get you all sweaty. A forthcoming job interview may also wreck a havoc, and so on. They’re both threatening conditions to be in, too. You feel this way because you’re uncertain about their outcomes.

Now, while you experience this, a region in your brain known as hypothalamus alerts your body. Then your adrenaline (a stress hormone) is pumped up which then increases your heart rate and your blood pressure, and boosts the body’s need for energy supplies. All of these happen at abnormal rates – faster this time around.

Now, the cortisol (the stress hormone) takes the driver’s seat. The level of sugar in your blood is increased and your brain also calls for more glucose. At this point nearly everything in your system starts going wrong. Your immune system is being suppressed, same with the digestive system. Nearly everything in your body is affected – including your mood.

Stress Is Doing More Damage To Your Health Than You Thought

The belief by many is that stress only incapacitates you while it lasts, but that would be true if we were talking about normal stress; the one that results from a panic or an ordinary threat that you experience once in a while. If stress occurs often and is left unmanaged, it becomes chronic which is, of course, fatal and does more than you can ever imagine.

The World Health Organization has labeled stress the “health epidemic of the 21^st century.” ^[1] According to the Centre for Disease Control/National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health ^[2], 110 million people die of causes that are directly linked to stress. We have gotten used to stress, and many are blind to how much damage unmanaged chronic stress can cause. Now it’s the time to really look into the problem and try to fix it as soon as possible before it causes too much harm to your body.