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The Stress Response What Happens Inside Your Body?
March 12, 2011
Imagine that you are about to be eaten by a Lion!
The brain interprets this situation as being very stressful which puts you in imminent danger and so begins a chain of events that should help you cope and hopefully get you away from the Lion.
Firstly a part of the brain called the Hypothalamus sends out hormonal messages via the endocrine system to various organs and glands all over the body telling them to get ready to either fight the Lion or runaway.
The hormones include adrenaline and have the following effects:
- Your Muscles tense up ready for quick movement.
- Your Pupils constrict to focus your vision.
- Your heart rate and blood pressure increase to pump blood faster around your body supplying essential organs with nutrients and oxygen to help them perform quickly.
- Your breathing rate increases to take in more oxygen to feed your muscles and organs.
- The Liver releases more glucose to provide instant energy.
- Digestive secretions reduce but bowel movement increases ready to evacuate anything that’s not necessary or essential to survival.
- Your blood produces a clotting factor to help the healing process should the lion take a bite.
- You begin to sweat to cool the surface of the skin and encourage blood to flow back to the essential organs in the center of the body.
But it’s all okay in the end because the Lion runs the other way! The stressful situation is over and everything within your body returns to a normal balance. Phew!
Thankfully today most of us don’t need to worry about being eaten by a Lion but work, families, illness and pain can cause us constant stress.
If you read the example above again but instead of the Lion being the image that causes you stress imagine it’s a busy work schedule or chronic back pain.
The body goes through exactly the same response but this time the stress doesn’t disappear so the responses continue and your body stays in this heightened state ready for action.
Your body thinks that the best way to deal with the stress or anxiety is to keep providing you with more adrenaline and the increased levels in your system can give you some strange symptoms:
- Feeling short of breath
- A fast heart-beat that you can feel pounding in your chest this may also cause some pain in your chest
- You may start to feel faint or dizzy
- Start to sweat
- Develop a ringing in your ears
- Your hands and feet might start to feel tingly
- Develop hot and cold flushes
- Nausea
- Urgency to go to the toilet or an increase in frequency
- Have a feeling of absolute terror and not being able to understand why
- Everything around you starts to feel unreal
Stress over prolonged periods of time then starts to have a detrimental effect on your body.
The continued stress on the heart rate and blood pressure can lead to more serious heart problems.
The adrenal glands begin to enlarge and lose their stores of hormones this can then cause a feeling of chronic fatigue and muscles may also start to feel weak.
Chronic muscular tension can occur in muscles that have forgotten how to relax.
The digestive system continues to be suppressed and this may lead to symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Your immune system becomes affected and looses its ability to fight off infection and repair damaged tissues and cells, you may notice that you seem to pick up every cold and bug that’s going around.
It is possible to change this circle of events!
When you’ve been under a prolonged period of stress and have begun to notice the signs and symptoms that it’s now taking its toll on your body. A change in lifestyle or introduction of new coping mechanisms and relaxation techniques may be necessary to encourage the body to return to a gentle feeling of balance.
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