What is stress?

Stress is the tension that we feel within us whenever we feel threatened. When we see something outside of us that is threatening, we tense up in reaction.

Imagine yourself as a spring. When everything is going well and you feel safe and secure, your spring is relaxed. But if something unexpected happens that weren’t counting on, you react by tensing up your spring. This creates a tense feeling within.

But it doesn’t stop there. The emotional reaction initiates an alarm reaction in our body. This alarm reaction within our physical body is programmed in. Whenever we experience anything stressful, our body runs the same program.

Answering...What is stress? necessitates looking at both the emotional and physical aspects of the stress experience. Our body's physical responses to stress are often referred to by researchers as the "stress response".

The body's stress response.

When we see something threatening and react, our hypothalamus goes into action. It’s alarm spreads throughout our body in two ways. One is directly through the nervous system and the other is through hormones secreted into the blood stream.

The hypothalamus stimulates nerves throughout the body that rev things up. These nerves stimulate the heart to beat faster and blood vessels to constrict. As a result blood pressure rises and blood circulates through the body faster. Blood is routed away from the digestive organs and to the muscles.

The hypothalamus also signals the alarm to the master gland of the body, the pituitary. The pituitary spreads the alarm through the blood. It secretes a hormone which travels in seconds to the stress glands of the body—the adrenal glands.

The body’s accelerator - the adrenal glands.

When we suffer stress for long periods of time the adrenal glands begin to show the effects of chronic overwork. At first the daily rhythm of the adrenal glands is thrown off. This often results in highs and lows of energy during the day and abnormally at night. If further depleted, the adrenals no longer secrete key hormones when they are needed. The resulting adrenal exhaustion can result in chronic fatigue.

All of our reactions—from our perception of danger, to our emotional reactions, to our body’s physical changes, are parts of stress. Psychologists tend to focus on our perceptions and feelings in relation to stress. Coping with stress is a learned skill. Doctors and biologists focus on the physical changes which occur during the stress response. Beyond a doubt, researchers have demonstrated that chronic stress causes deterioration of health.

Traditional medicine recognizes the ill effects of chronic stress and its contribution to many diseases. Yet traditional medicine has done little to develop ways to combat stress. Tools to alleviate the impact of stress are found more in alternative medicine.

More often than not we suppress our feelings of stress. Often when we are experiencing stress we are unaware of it. Modern stresses are quite different from those that our body was designed to deal with. Our body’s programmed response to perceived threats is the same whether we see a lion who wants to eat us or hear that we may lose our job. All our systems rev themselves up to fight or run.

In olden times we ran like the dickens from the lion, and if we escaped we heaved a huge sigh of relief and relaxed up in a tree. Now-a-days we may have the threat of losing our job hanging over our head for months or years. What’s worse is we often can’t do anything about it. It may have nothing to do with our job performance—something that we can control. It may be due to the economy, or the whim of the company president, etc. In the latter case we remain under constant stress for weeks, months or years.

The realities of modern stress.

Of all our organs, the first casualty of stress is usually the adrenal glands. Under the demands of chronic stress, the ability of the adrenal glands to respond can gradually decline. This is referred to as adrenal fatigue or adrenal exhaustion by clinicians. To learn about adrenal fatigue, click here. I have seen many patients who are obviously under stress. Yet when asked many of them say that they don’t have much stress. Since we can’t change something that we aren’t aware of, it is often helpful to see what the common symptoms of stress are. To take a self-assessment test for stress symptoms and adrenal fatigue, click here.

The symptoms of stress are signs of deterioration of adrenal function.

With ongoing stress the ability of our stress organs (brain, pituitary, adrenal glands, etc.) frequently deteriorates. This wearing down of our system is seen mostly in the adrenal glands. Their secretion of the necessary stress hormones declines and we feel the effects through symptoms such as fatigue.

As the deterioration of our adrenal function progresses symptoms such as fatigue, which use to be an occasional thing, become more frequent. The severity can also increase. Whereas we used to feel tired only on occasion, now we are tired every single day.

The breakdown of the body’s stress system can be evaluated clinically by doctors. The health of your stress response system can be tested through laboratory tests which measure the levels of hormones being secreted by the adrenal glands. To learn more about the clinical stages of adrenal exhaustion and its evaluation, click here.

One common symptom of stress is insomnia