Is Stress A Routine Affair In Your Life?

Stress seems to be a part of modern day living especially in the metropolis. We might not be aware but every day stresses of fast-paced life can have a detrimental effect on the health and wellbeing. Ironically, you might not be aware that you are under stress because it has become a routine affair.

Everybody experience a stressful event in their lifetime. We all face stress-causing situations and circumstances in our life. Humans are designed to experience stress and react to it. You can experience stress from your environment, your body, and your thoughts. These stressors may stem from daily events such as getting stuck in a traffic; not able to get up on time; professional demands of meeting deadlines; long working hours; office politics; health issues or may be encountered as a life-changing event such as divorce; bereavement; financial crisis etc. Different people react differently to stress, the way people react or cope with stress has a lot to do with how they are educated or directed to sail through under such circumstances in their formative years.

Stress can affect all the aspects of your life including your behaviour, emotions, thinking ability, and overall physical health. Acute stress does no harm as long as you recover from it and move on in life. It is the daily regular dose of stressors which you should be more concerned with.  

Body’s response to acute stress

An acute stressful event which is perceived as a threat will throw your entire system in a tizzy. The heightened alert state you experience is brought on by the release of certain biochemicals called stress hormones. Cortisol, catecholamines, and neuropeptides are such hormones produced by the body. This is a body’s reaction to help you cope with the situation at hand. You react as per your instinct to either fight or flight, making proper use of these hormones.  This adaptive response to stress is beneficial in the short term. However long-term or repetitive production of such hormones can adversely affect the entire body and predispose to more illnesses, chronic disease, and tissue damage.

Role of Cortisol, the stress hormone

Cortisol is produced in the adrenal cortex and is also called an arousal hormone. The adrenal gland under normal circumstances produces a predictable day–night pattern of cortisol secretion. This diurnal variation in cortisol secretion producing higher cortisol levels in the daytime (for activity) and lower levels at night (for rest) contribute to the body’s circadian rhythm. Cortisol is the primary hormone responsible for the stress response. The effects of cortisol are felt over virtually the entire body and impact several homeostatic mechanisms. While cortisol’s primary targets are metabolic, it also affects ion transport, the immune response, and even memory. Chronically elevated cortisol is a biomarker for stress and is associated with many chronic diseases. The endocrine, gastrointestinal, immune, and neurologic systems are most subject to chronic stress.

So, watch out for chronic stress as long-term stress can build up slowly over a period of time to suddenly surface as an organ specific disease such as type 2 diabetes, thyroid problem, gastric troubles, cardiac condition and so on. Of course, there are many factors at play to initiate this imbalance but stress seems to be one of the important factors implied in many chronic diseases of aging.