Our body’s natural inclination with physiological stress is flight or flight response. Back in the time of cavemen, the only stress was a live or die situation (running from a bear or fierce animal). Our stress response was created to 1. Be short acting and 2. To keep us alive.
Our body goes into sympathetic overdrive to keep us alive. This means the release of epinephrine to increase heart rate so blood and nutrients can pump all around our body, and most pertinent to this post, increasing cortisol which will cause glucose to be put into our blood stream so our muscles can use it as energy
What this means is that this sympathetic overdrive also downregulates certain systems of our body that aren’t pertinent to staying alive in that moment.
This includes:
1. Reproduction: Your body would not think about conceiving if you were in this stressful moment.
2. Gastrointestinal: No need to digest food if your running for you life
3. Immune: No point in fighting off a bacteria or virus, again if you’re not going to be alive in 5 minutes .
Remember, the stress response was created to be SHORT TERM.
Now fast forward to our society today who deals with chronic stress. What you end up seeing is hormonal imbalances, gastrointestinal dysfunction (GERD/reflux, IBS, etc), and immune dysfunction (either they get sick all the time and/or they get one cold and it takes a month to recover).
That’s important is that this stress response occurs if its physical, mental, emotional, or even perceived stress. If our mind is constantly perceiving stress, you are raising havoc on your body.
This is why it is so important to practice mindfulness, meditation, affirmations and positivity; not allowing us to have those wondering negative thoughts because although they seem harmless, they truly are affecting us!
