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?
There are two types of stress—eustress, which demands a person to adapt or change and thus is helpful, and distress which arise from unpleasant stressors and thus is harmful. Whenever I experience distress from stressors such as pressure, family problems, and traumatic events, some clinical manifestations I notice are dizziness, heart palpitations, chest pain, cold hands, nausea, and fatigue. I also become easily irritated and have trouble sleeping.
After studying the endocrine system, I learned how our body responds to stress in three stages. The first stage is the fight-or-flight response, wherein our brain, skeletal muscles, and heart are the most active to either fight or flee from danger. The sympathetic nervous system activation accounts for our experience of dizziness, increased heart rate, chest pain, and cold hands. The second stage is the resistance reaction wherein corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH), and thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH) triggers the release of different hormones to help continue fighting the stressor after the flight-or-flight response dissipates and help our bodies return to its normal state. The prolonged levels of high stress (increased release of cortisol) may cause irritability and sleeplessness. If it fails to combat the stressor, the third stage, exhaustion, occurs. In this stage, the body’s resources become depleted hence the fatigue and may lead to other stress-related disorders.
Although stress is a normal response to the demands of life, it is crucial to know how to manage our stressors and cope with them, as they may be detrimental to our health.
Reference
G. J. & Derrickson, B. (2014). Principles of Anatomy and Physiology. New York, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.