The Nature of Stress and Stress Release
This article looks at the nature of stress and the impact it has on your mind and body.Stress in its basic evolutionary form is a survival mechanism designed to get you quickly out of the way of danger. Its part of a trigger called the fight or flight mechanism. Stress at this level evolved over millions of years and provided an immediate biological response absolutely essential for our ancient ancestors’ survival. Imagine a cave man wandering through the vast forests of Northern Europe gathering food for days at a time, when from behind a tree appears a sabre-toothed tiger. As soon as our cave man is confronted with this potentially life threatening situation a whole series of biochemical responses take place in his body. The adrenal glands are stimulated to produce adrenalin. This in turn causes a number of physiological and biochemical changes to happen enabling our cave man to run faster, fight harder, see and hear better, and be more alert all within seconds of seeing the threat. It is a remarkable transformation.
On a biological level these are the changes that have taken place.
The blood vessels would constrict redirecting blood way from the stomach and organs not essential to fast action. This is why you may feel sick if you have just eaten and are suddenly fearful.
Muscles would tighten
The heart rate would increase to two or three times its normal speed pumping more oxygen rich blood to the muscles and brain
The rate of breathing would increase delivering more oxygen to the blood
Capillaries under the skin close down increasing blood pressure. This stops wounds bleeding
The eyes dilate allowing better focus
The blood vessels would constrict redirecting blood way from the stomach and organs not essential to fast action. This is why you may feel sick if you have just eaten and are suddenly fearful.
Muscles would tighten
The heart rate would increase to two or three times its normal speed pumping more oxygen rich blood to the muscles and brain
The rate of breathing would increase delivering more oxygen to the blood
Capillaries under the skin close down increasing blood pressure. This stops wounds bleeding
The eyes dilate allowing better focus
These physiological and biological changes are, as you can see, life saving for our cave man facing a hungry sabre-toothed tiger. But for us, today, living in a relatively safe environment they can be the cause of many health issues.
Imagine now we are in an office. We know job cuts are being made, we also know our job is up for discussion. The phone rings – it’s the boss asking you to come into his office. You think the worst, this is it. You start worrying about how you’re going to pay the bills, how long will it take to find another job - what will you do? Immediately and automatically your fight or flight mechanism kicks in. Your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate increases, capillaries in the skin close down and you start sweating, your muscles tighten and you feel a bit sick. The thing is, you’re not going to run and you’re certainly not going to fight. You enter the office and sit down. Congratulations – with all the redundancies they’ve amalgamated your job and you’ve got a promotion and a pay rise.
As can be seen with this example we don’t need the fight and flight mechanism for most of the situations that trigger it in our modern environment. Further more, many of the situations that trigger it don’t happen – all of those biological and physiological changes remarkably happened because we thought the worst and created an imaginary scenario in our mind.
95% of things we worry about never happen!
The more the mechanism is triggered the more harm it will start to have on the body. Short term stress isn’t a problem and actually is a necessary part of life. However, the body simply can not function properly when it is subjected to intense and prolonged stress, underlying anxiety and the resultant continuous high blood pressure and increased heart rate. In fact it is thought that some 70% of illnesses are caused by or related to stress.
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