The Physical Effects of Stress: How Your Fast-Paced Life Can Kill You

Positive stress from working toward inspiring, achievable goals and entering into a state of ‘flow,’ can provide intense life enjoyment and produce many health benefits. Negative stress can cause you to feel overwhelmed, anxious, restless, and depleted of energy.

Many of us slide across the line into negative stress far too often, entering the dangerous territory of a chronic, elevated stress response which has major implications for your short term and long term health.

Yes, it is true – chronic stress can kill you, not just now, but also much later in your life.

How stress works

Physiologically, ‘stress’ means that your system is in a state of elevated stress response.

The human stress response is regulated by the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS response affects every organ in your body.

When a high stress response is triggered by ‘stressors’ communicated from the brain (insert your personal triggers here!), the sympathetic ANS goes into ‘fight or flight response’. When the brain communicates that the perceived danger is over, the parasympathetic ANS shifts into relaxation and restoration mode.

Normally, those two modes balance out over time, but the effects of ongoing stress can cause you to get stuck in a chronically elevated stress response, which means that your body and all your inner organs are damaged by high levels of stress hormones and never get the benefit of relaxation.

Dangerous effects of stress right now

• Rapid breathing can bring on panic attacks or asthma episodes.

• A faster heart rate means higher blood pressure.

• Effects of stress on your digestion can cause heartburn, diarrhea and vomiting.

• A high stress response may sharpen your mind temporarily, but it can also reduce cognitive processing abilities, prevent you from focusing and even impede your functioning while driving or operating machinery.
• Stress can also affect your relationships. Being snappy or on-edge can create unnecessary drama at work and at home. Our relationships are one of our primary buffers against stress and when those suffer, more stress occurs, creating a vicious cycle.

Long-term effects of stress on your health

If the elevated stress response continues for more than a few hours, some of the immediate effects of stress will start to change the operating conditions inside your body.

If you get stuck and your relaxation response can no longer activate sufficiently, long-term health effects are inevitable.

These problems include:

• Permanent high blood pressure

• Cardiovascular disease, including strokes and heart attacks

• Compromised immune system, including increased vulnerability to infections and chronic inflammation. Slow healing wounds and infections

• Impotence in men and irregular periods in women, infertility in both

• Diabetes and other metabolic disorders

Death by stress

‘Sudden death’ in adults, usually by cardiac arrest i.e. heart attack, is strongly associated with chronic stress.

Other conditions, like a compromised immune system, diabetes, and hypertension will take longer to kill you. Once your internal organs have been damaged, you will need medical intervention to reverse the effects of stress on them, even if you no longer experience the chronic stress that caused those harmful changes in the first place.

Kill the killer – reactivate your natural relaxation system

Improving your health, and potentially saving your life, doesn’t mean that you have to lie in bed, watch TV, and sleep for the rest of your life (that would, in fact, also be a recipe for disastrous damage to your health).

Try instead to restore the natural balance between the stress and relaxation response.

• Recognize the fine line between positive and negative stress. Cross it only when absolutely necessary (hint: if ‘absolutely necessary’ is most of the time then you need to change your definition of ‘necessary’). Short peaks of negative stress are ok, chronic stress is not.

• Learn relaxation techniques, mindfulness, and how to create healthy priorities.

• Play. Forget your deadlines and live in the present moment. Connect to your childlike self.

• Exercise. Your system will reward you by lowering stress levels – unless you re-introduce them by being too competitive.

• Focus on important personal relationships.

• Check in with your dreams, not just your goals.

• Create a long-term lifestyle that nurtures and supports you. You won’t be able to enjoy financial and status rewards if chronic stress kills you before you earn them (or shortly thereafter).

If you feel that your stress is out of hand and is creating physical, emotional, or relational problems for you, it is likely time to seek help. Mindfulness based therapy can be incredibly helpful in reducing stress and creating peace both within yourself and in your relationships. Finding a therapist with which you feel comfortable sharing is central to the effectiveness of therapy. I invite you to schedule a free 20 minute phone consultation to discuss how therapy can help your unique situation by calling 408-213-8148 or by scheduling online at www.GingerMartirePhD.com.