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?
It is undeniable that humans continuously experience stress in our everyday lives. The day-to-day struggles we have to deal with, as well as the sudden life-changing events in life, may affect our emotions, in one way or another, depending on how we perceive them. Specifically, as a student, I often experience both types of stress: eustress and distress. Eustress greatly helps me in the constant pursuit of my goals and aspirations in life, whereas distress often happens whenever I feel too overwhelmed by all the requirements and other outside factors that contribute to it all.
In line with this, I notice several body reactions and clinical manifestations from the different stressors that I encounter. For instance, I often experience an increased heart rate, sudden headaches, uncharacterized coughing, waves of nausea, heightened sensitivity, and a lot more.
As I study the endocrine system and the stress response, I have learned that these clinical manifestations happen because our body is constantly trying to maintain homeostasis through responding and regulating the stress we are experiencing. It can be explained in three stages: (1) the fight-or-flight response, or alarm, (2) resistance reaction, and (3) exhaustion stage. Primarily, as the nervous system detects the stress, it signals the other systems to trigger a response to fight or ‘flight’ or escape the stressor. This process can be explained by the increased heartbeats and heightened alertness to be able to respond to the given situation. Then, the resistance reaction helps in continuing the response to the stressor to a longer period of time. Within this stage, different hormones like CRH, GHRH, and TRH stimulate the secretion of more hormones in order for the body to perform and prolong the response to stress. However, it may come to a point wherein the body fails to overcome the stressor, in which the exhaustion stage occurs. Here, the resources are depleted and consumed, so the body cannot prolong the resistance stage anymore; and extended periods of exposure to cortisol and other hormones may negatively affect and compromise several organs of the body. It may also result in a lot of negative conditions like fatigue and anxiety.
Consequently, the intricacies of the process made me realize how important the endocrine system is to stress response and the body as a whole. It aids me to understand that I also need to help my well-being through adapting appropriate and healthy coping mechanisms to reduce the distress that I may feel in the near future.
References
Walinga, J. (2019, June 28). 12.3 Stress and Coping – Introduction to Psychology. Pressbooks. https://openpress.usask.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/stress-and-coping/
Tortora, G. J., & Derrickson, B. (2014). Principles of Anatomy and Physiology (14th ed.). Wiley.