Stress helps you meet your daily challenges and motivates you to reach your goals, ultimately making you a smarter, happier, and healthier person. However when you are stressed, what body reactions or clinical manifestations do you often experience? After studying the endocrine system and the stress response, can you explain how these clinical manifestations occur?
Each person's definition of stress is unique. But I find that when I'm stressed, I get the following symptoms: headache, difficulty getting to sleep, and low energy.
Stress is the body's response to vulnerable situations, whether they are real or only perceived as such. A chemical response in your body happens when you feel threatened, enabling you to take action to stop harm from happening. The stress response, sometimes known as "fight-or-flight," is the body's response to a threat and is characterized by an increase in heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension, and blood pressure.
The brain starts a chain of events involving the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is the main regulator of the endocrine stress response, when someone views a situation as difficult, dangerous, or unpredictable. As a result, the synthesis of steroid hormones known as glucocorticoids; among which is cortisol, also known as the "stress hormone"—increases.
Immune system control and inflammation reduction depend on glucocorticoids, such as cortisol. Even though this is helpful in tense or frightening settings where an injury could lead to greater immune system activation, prolonged stress can lead to poor immune system and HPA axis communication. Numerous physical and mental health issues, including as chronic fatigue, metabolic disorders such as diabetes, obesity, depression, and immunological disorders have all been related to the eventual emergence of this poor communication.
REFERENCES:
Stress effects on the body. (2018, November 1). American Psychological Association. Retrieved October 13, 2022, from https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/body