Stress is everywhere. It’s a part of everyone’s lives. Be it gained from your daily trip through traffic, late for a meeting or itching to get home and watching the time tick by. Maybe it’s from an upcoming deadline for a project your dreading. It could come from familial pressure. No matter where it comes from, you’ve had to deal with stress in your life. And in this article, we’ll be going over the effects that stress have on the different systems in your body.
And just to get scientific, what stress actually is in a medical or biological context is a physical, mental, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tensions. Stress can be internal or external, and can initiate the fight or flight response within your body. Now, let’s look at the effect it can have on some of your body’s systems.
Musculoskeletal System
When you get stressed, your muscle tense up, as muscle tension is a reflex reaction to stress to help your body guard itself from injury and pain. And with the sudden onset of a stressful situation, the muscles all tense up at once, and then release when the stress passes.
Chronic stress causes the muscles in the body to be in a more or less constant state of guardedness. When muscles are taut and tense for long periods of time, this may trigger other reactions of the body and even promote stress-related disorders. For example, both tension-type headache and migraine headache are associated with chronic muscle tension in the area of the shoulders, neck and head.
Nervous System
The nervous system is made up of a few different divisions. The divisions are the central, involving the brain and spinal cord, and the perpheral division consisting of the automatic and somatic nervous systems. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) has a direct role in physical response to stress and is divided into the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
When your body is stressed, the SNS generates the fight or flight response I mentioned earlier. The body shifts all of it’s resources towards fighting off a life threat, or running from it. The SNS signals the adrenal glands in your body to release hormones called adrenalin and cortisol. These hormones cause your heart rate go go up, and your respiration rate to go faster, and blood vessels in your arms and legs to dialate, and your blood sugar levels increase to deal with the emergency.
Endrocrine
And the last system I’ll be discussing in this article is the Endocrine system. While adrenaline and noradrenaline are considered the main culprits for anxiety, nearly every organ releases hormones as a result of stress. After the initial epinephrine release, the body goes into what’s known as the “Resistance Phase.”
During this phase your body releases cortisol, which causes your body to suppress the immune system, reduce inflammation, break down fat in your tissues, and also prevent protein synthesis. Though cortisol has all of these negative features, it should be noted that they do play a purpose in the fight or flight response. If you were faced with danger, all of these actions would help ensure you stay safe. But because there is no danger and because cortisol release is chronic, that is why cortisol ends up being so damaging to your health and the body.
So as you can see, stress can cause and influence the course of many medical conditions, and even psychological conditions such as depression or anxiety. Stress management is something I’ll be discussing in a future article, as it’s recognized as an effective treatment modality for controlling your body’s stress.
