Step aside Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy there is a new serial killer in town. He goes by the name of Stress! There is little doubt that stress is worse than the most notorious serial killer. Just like you warn your children not to talk with strangers and install security systems in your home in order to maintain your safety, you must also take steps to prevent stress from killing you!
Most people, including doctors, don’t really appreciate the incredible power of stress. People tend to trivialize stress, brush it off or underestimate its threat. They act like stress is much like drinking too much coffee and it will go away in time. However, it doesn’t! Stress is always lurking in the shadows, waiting and watching for an opportunity to attack. The unwary victims of stress make up almost 90 percent of all visits to primary care physicians.
Stress Defined
Stress is a measure of your mental and physical ability/inability to deal with circumstances beyond your control. Stressors are threats, demands, or changes to which you attach special, significant importance, and with which you may struggle or feel uncertainty. Some stressors like the environment or dysfunctional family issues may operate only in the subconscious realm. Victims of stress do not always realize they are being affected.
Common stressors include the loss of a loved one or the emotional longing for someone who is unavailable, especially a spouse or family members; financial distress; being overworked at your job, at home, or in your studies; caretaking; workplace and personal relationship struggles; environment; physical pain; weight gain; divorce; and other fears of loss and inability to meet external demands.
How Stress Is Killing You
When you encounter a stressful situation, stress hormones flood your bloodstream so that you can respond quickly and with strength. Watching your child blindly run across a busy street, for example, might induce a hormonal response that enables you to catch your youngster before any harm is done. Specifically, your pituitary gland discharges ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone) into the bloodstream. ACTH, in turn, causes the release of epinephrine (adrenalin) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline), from your sympathetic nerves into the bloodstream. These hormones serve as neurotransmitters that signal the body to prepare for emergency action.
Your body will immediately experience increased heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, and muscle tension that serve to supply adequate blood to your brain and musculoskeletal system. Higher levels of free fatty acids and blood sugar are released to provide immediate energy to survive the perceived emergency. This is what we call the well-known “fight or flight response.”
Absence of Threat
Your body’s response to a threat was designed as a short term solution to immediately save your life. However, when the emergency never goes away, as in the environment or workplace, your body’s response may wreak havoc with your health. In most emotionally stressful social situations, for example those that result from ongoing work, financial worry, or personal relationships, you don’t actually flee or fight, which would use up most of the hormones your body produced. Instead, you end up storing the stress in your muscles along one of four patterns. This throws your body out of balance and increases the effects of gravity and the body’s degenerative cascade.
Long-term chronic stress can wreck your nervous system through a cyclic adrenaline rush. It can cause oxidative damage to tissues in the body that leads to inflammation. It can stoke symptoms such as headache, common cold, recurrent herpes and obesity, AIDS and cancer achy neck, ulcer, allergies, and coronary disease.
Too much stress, over time, can exhaust your body, your adrenal glands where cortisol is produced, accelerate your body’s degenerative cascade, harm your immune system, and even shrink vital brain tissue resulting in memory loss and problems with concentration.
Stress-Busters − Find a Solution that Works For You
We all need to find our own personal long-term protection from stress and not take it lightly. Many people are finding a solution here at the Life-Wave Living Center using the Rikian Exerciser™ and other stress reduction methods promoted by Ian Reinbott. (Click here to schedule an appointment)
Finding a way to relieve the effects of stress in your body is critical for your long-term health and exercise is very much preferred to other stress relief like; alcohol, over eating, drugs, etc. So, come to the Life-Wave Living Center for the healthiest exercise in the world! #Isstresskillingyou
