By Dr. Mercola
As much as you may try to ignore it, you cannot separate your
wellness from your emotions. Every feeling you have affects some
part of your body, and stress can wreak havoc on your physical
health even if you’re doing everything else “right.”
The classic definition of stress is “any real or imagined
threat, and your body’s response to it.” Celebrations and
tragedies alike can cause a stress response in your body.
All of your feelings, positive or negative, create
physiological changes. Your skin, heart rate, digestion, joints,
muscle energy levels, the hair on your head, and countless cells
and systems you don't even know about change with every emotion.
Stress plays a major role in your immune system, and can
impact your blood pressure, cholesterol levels, brain chemistry,
blood sugar levels, and hormonal balance. It can even “break”
your heart, and is increasingly being viewed as a cardiovascular
risk marker.
Women are more vulnerable to feeling sadness and anxiety than
men, according to research, and feel the pressures of stress
more than their male peers, both at work and at home.
You cannot eliminate stress entirely, but you can work to
provide your body with tools to compensate for the bioelectrical
short-circuiting that can cause serious disruption in many of
your body's important systems.
By using techniques such as the
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), you can reprogram your
body’s reactions to the unavoidable stressors of everyday life.
Exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, and meditation are
also important “release valves” that can help you manage your
stress.
How Women Experience Stress
Some stress is unavoidable; mild forms of stress can even be
helpful in some situations. A stressor becomes a problem when:
- Your response to it is negative.
- Your feelings and emotions are inappropriate for the
circumstances.
- Your response lasts an excessively long time.
- You’re feeling continuously overwhelmed, overpowered or
overworked.
According to the featured article in The Guardian,1
certain themes connect women’s experience of stress.
Stomach-churning anxiety, for example, is far more common in
women than men. As is feelings of sadness in response to stress,
and not being able to stop thinking about that which worries
them.
This in and of itself may feed into a vicious cycle that
makes matters progressively worse, because when you dwell on
negative emotions you internalize the stress, which can make it
more difficult to come up with constructive ways to address the
problem.
According to Dr. Tara Chaplin, who led a 2008 study2
investigating the role of gender and emotion, sadness and
anxiety are very passive emotions, so while you’re
sitting there thinking and worrying, you’re less likely to
assert yourself and engage in active problem-solving.
This could be particularly problematic in the workplace, she
warns. She suggests finding other, more active methods of coping
instead of ruminating and dwelling on negative emotions. What
can you change about the situation to make it better? What can
you do to lessen those stressful feelings?
“Take an active role and thinking of healthy ways to
cope – which could be anything from exercise, meditating,
using some new mindfulness techniques, taking breaks for
yourself," she told The Guardian.
"I focus my research on how women and men cope with
stress, but we also need to have a conversation about what
can be done societally to reduce stress on women... Are
there programs that can be in place for subsidizing daycare
so you have good daycare? Could we have longer maternity
leave? These sorts of things are really important."
How Stress Affects Your Heart
In related news, mounting research shows that people exposed
to traumatic and/or long-term stressors, such as combat
veterans, New Orleans residents who went through Hurricane
Katrina, and Greeks struggling through financial turmoil, have
higher rates of cardiac problems than the general population.
According to NBC News:3
“Disasters and prolonged stress can raise 'fight or
flight' hormones that affect blood pressure, blood sugar and
other things in ways that make heart trouble more likely,
doctors say. They also provoke anger and helplessness and
spur heart-harming behaviors like eating or drinking too
much.
'We're starting to connect emotions with
cardiovascular risk markers and the new research adds
evidence of a link,' said Dr. Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist
at NYU Langone Medical Center and an American Heart
Association spokeswoman.”
In one such study, which involved nearly 208,000 veterans
aged 46 to 74, 35 percent of those diagnosed with post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) developed insulin resistance in two
years, compared to only 19 percent of those not diagnosed with
PTSD.
Insulin resistance can lead to type 2 diabetes and hardening
of the arteries. PTSD sufferers also had higher rates of
metabolic syndrome — a collection of risk factors that raise
your risk of heart disease, such as high body fat, cholesterol,
blood pressure and blood sugar levels. More than half (about 53
percent) of veterans with PTSD had several of these symptoms,
compared to 37 percent of those not suffering with PTSD.
According to the featured article:
“The numbers are estimates and are not as important
as the trend — more heart risk with more stress, said one
study leader, Dr. Ramin Ebrahimi, a cardiologist at the
Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center and a professor at
UCLA. It shows that PTSD can cause physical symptoms, not
just the mental ones commonly associated with it.
'Twenty or 30 years ago PTSD was a term reserved for
combat veterans. We have come to realize now that PTSD is
actually a much more common disorder and it can happen in
veterans who did not undergo combat but had a very traumatic
experience such as losing a friend,' he said. That goes for
others who suffer trauma such as being raped, robbed at
gunpoint or in a serious accident, he said. Nearly 8 million
Americans have PTSD, the National Institute of Mental Health
estimates.”
Is It a Heart Attack, or 'Broken Heart Syndrome?'
Extreme grief, regardless of the cause, can actually "break"
your heart according to previous research. In comparing how
grief affects your heart disease risk within a period of time,
researchers found that losing a significant person in your life
raises your risk of having a heart attack the next day by 21
times, and in the following week by 6 times.4
The risk of heart attacks began to decline after about a month
had passed, perhaps as levels of stress hormones begin to level
out.
The study did not get into the causes of the abrupt increase
in risk of cardiovascular events like a heart attack, but it's
likely related to the flood of stress hormones your body is
exposed to following extreme stress. For instance, adrenaline
increases your blood pressure and your heart rate, and it's been
suggested it may lead to narrowing of the arteries that supply
blood to your heart, or even bind directly to heart cells
allowing large amounts of calcium to enter and render the cells
temporarily unable to function properly.
Interestingly, while your risk of heart attack increases
following severe stress, so does your risk of what's known as
stress cardiomyopathy -- or "broken heart syndrome" -- which is
basically a "temporary" heart attack that occurs due to stress.
The symptoms of stress cardiomyopathy or broken heart syndrome
are very similar to those of a typical heart attack -- chest
pain, shortness of breath, low blood pressure and even
congestive heart failure can occur. There are some important
differences, however.
In broken heart syndrome, the symptoms occur shortly after an
extremely stressful event, such as a death in the family,
serious financial loss, extreme anger, domestic abuse, a serious
medical diagnosis, or a car accident or other trauma.
This stress and the subsequent release of stress hormones are
thought to "stun" or "shock" the heart, leading to sudden heart
muscle weakness. This condition can be life-threatening and
requires immediate medical attention, however it is often a
temporary condition that leaves no permanent damage.5
In most cases a typical heart attack occurs due to blockages in
the coronary arteries that stop blood flow and cause heart cells
to die, leading to irreversible damage. But people with broken
heart syndrome often have normal arteries without significant
blockages. The symptoms occur due to the emotional stress, so
when the stress begins to die down, the heart is able to
recover.
How the Stress Response Affects Your Digestion and Health
Your heart is not the only organ that takes a beating when
you’re stressed. While under stress, your heart rate goes up,
your blood pressure rises, and blood is shunted away from your
midsection, going to your arms, legs, and head for quick
thinking, fighting, or fleeing. All of these changes are
referred to as the physiological stress response.
Under those circumstances, your
digestion also completely shuts down, which can have
severe ramifications for your overall health. Americans are
notorious for “eating on the run,” which can negate the benefits
you’d otherwise reap from eating a healthier diet (or make the
effects of a poor diet worse). The stress response causes a
number of detrimental events in your body, including:
Decreased nutrient absorption |
Elevated cholesterol |
Increased food sensitivity |
Decreased oxygenation to your gut |
Elevated triglycerides |
Heart burn |
As much as four times less blood flow to your digestive
system, which leads to decreased metabolism |
Decreased gut flora populations |
Decreased enzymatic output in your gut – as much as
20,000-fold! |
Perhaps most importantly, when your body is under the stress
response, your cortisol and insulin levels rise. These two
hormones tend to track each other, and when your cortisol is
consistently elevated under a chronic low-level stress response,
you may experience difficulty losing weight or building muscle.
Additionally, if your cortisol is chronically elevated, you’ll
tend to gain weight around your midsection, which is a major
contributing factor to developing diabetes and
metabolic syndrome. Many nutrients that are critical for
health are also excreted during stress,
particularly:
- Water-soluble vitamins
- Macrominerals
- Microminerals
- Calcium (calcium excretion can increase as much as 60 to
75 mg within an hour of a stressful event)
Tending to Your Gut is Important to Help Combat Mental Stress
What this all boils down to is that when you eat under
stress, your body is in the opposite state of where you
need to be in order to digest, assimilate nutrients and burn
calories. You could be eating the healthiest food in the world,
but if your body cannot fully digest and assimilate that food,
then you will not reap the benefits from it, nor will you be
able to burn calories effectively.
Interestingly, neurotransmitters like serotonin are also
found in your gut. In fact, the greatest concentration of
serotonin, which is involved in mood control, depression and
suppressing aggression, is found within your intestines, not
your brain. It’s no surprise then that scientific evidence shows
that nourishing your
gut flora with the friendly bacteria with
fermented foods or probiotics is extremely important for
proper brain function, including psychological well-being and
mood control. For instance, the probiotic known as
Bifidobacterium longum NCC3001 has been shown to normalize
anxiety-like behavior in mice with infectious colitis.6
Research published in 20117
also demonstrated that probiotics have a direct effect on brain
chemistry under normal conditions -- in such a way that can
impact your feelings of anxiety or depression.
In short, the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus had a marked
effect on GABA [an inhibitory neurotransmitter that is
significantly involved in regulating many physiological and
psychological processes] levels in certain brain regions and
lowered the stress-induced hormone corticosterone, resulting in
reduced anxiety- and depression-related behavior. The authors
concluded:
"Together, these findings highlight the important
role of bacteria in the bidirectional communication of the
gut-brain axis and suggest that certain organisms may prove
to be useful therapeutic adjuncts in stress-related
disorders such as anxiety and depression."
For Optimal Health, Take Stress Management Seriously
You cannot eliminate stress entirely, but you can work to
provide your body with tools to compensate for the bioelectrical
short-circuiting that can cause serious disruption in many of
your body's important systems. By using energy psychology
techniques such as the
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), you can reprogram your
body’s reactions to the unavoidable stressors of everyday life.
EFT stimulates different energy meridian points in your body by
tapping them with your fingertips while tapping on specific key
locations, custom-made verbal affirmations are said repeatedly.
This can be done alone or under the supervision of a qualified
therapist.8
Seeking the help of a licensed therapist is particularly
recommended if you’re dealing with trauma-based stress such as
PTSD or grief following the loss of a loved one. There are also
many other
stress-management strategies you can employ to help you
unwind and address your stress, including:
-
Exercise. Studies have shown that during exercise,
tranquilizing chemicals (endorphins) are released in your
brain. Exercise is a natural way to bring your body
pleasurable relaxation and rejuvenation, and has been shown
to help protect against the physical effects of daily stress
- Restorative
sleep
-
Meditation (with or without the additional aid of
brain wave synchronization technology)
- Schedule time to eat without rushing, and make sure to
maintain optimal gut health by regularly consuming fermented
foods, such as fermented vegetables, or taking a
high-quality probiotics supplement
© Copyright 1997-2013 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.