How does living in stress affect your mental and physical health?
Chronic stress impacts all of our body systems. Utilizing practices to bring your body into more homeostasis or balance can have a positive impact to your physical function, your pain and your general health and wellness. Learn more about it all here!
Stress is a constellation of events consisting of a stimulus (stressor), which precipitates a reaction in the brain (stress perception), which then activates the physiological fight or flight systems in the brain and body (stress response). See my post of the fight or flight response in my blog post here.
This response can occur to varying degrees along a continuum and can occur in response to many different stimuli (most people have more than one thing stressing them, am I right?).
In the past, this has been a largely adaptive response. For example, if you were out hunting and came across a predator, it would be very important to engage this response to mobilize energy to your body systems that would help you to survive this encounter. Once you found safety, your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems would come into balance and homeostasis would be quickly restored.
Short term, the stress response is also adaptive for us. Allowing us to mobilize the energy we need to escape some threat to us. However, these days in our fast-paced society, it is known that individuals spend a large portion of their day in some degree of this response. Long term, this is a maladaptive response and this can result in dysregulation within our nervous system. Having chronic stress can have a huge impact on how we function throughout the day, how we think and feel, how we move our bodies, pain levels, etc.
The stress response can occur from many different stimuli from running from a predator, rushing around all day trying to get things done, getting stressed in traffic or at work, to simply thinking about a stressor or problem we might be having. For humans, thought alone can trigger this system wide response and the effects are just that - system wide.
It is so important to our health and wellness that we each develop practices to bring our system into a more balanced, grounded/centred and calm state and that we have strategies that we can use to bring us back into balance more quickly following an inevitable trigger/response.
There are many tools, practices and strategies out there that can help. In this site I have highlighted a few that I have found to have strong evidence behind, that work particularly well and that I myself practice daily (and that have transformed my life in such positive ways).
See MEDITATION, HEART COHERENCE, PARASYMPATHETIC TECHNIQUES.
