LowCountry Wellness Center

 Stress Response System

Your Stress Response system (SRS) is what responds to the stress you are under on a daily basis. When it is over taxed it can actually kill you. The work that is piling up on your desk, the anxiousness building while you are sitting in traffic on the bridge, trying to balance your budget, relationships with your spouse or significant other, children or elderly family members, not having enough time in the day and especially not having enough time for yourself can put too much stress on your body and health. Having a healthy stress response system will allow you to deal with or respond to the stress in a healthier more efficient way.

What happens to your body when under stress?

Your body responds by sending out more adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline increases your heart rate, elevates your blood pressure and boosts energy supplies. The brain increases the output of the hormone cortisol.  Too much cortisol causes muscles to tighten, blood pressure to rise, immune levels to fall, limits the brain's ability to make decisions, and increases the retention of fat.  Under stress, the brain also limits the release of the hormone seratonin.   Seratonin helps you sleep, calms anxiety, and relieves depression.  Simply put, stress will limit your performance. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases sugars (glucose) in the bloodstream, enhances the brain's use of glucose and increases the availability of substances that repair tissues.

Your stress response system usually will quiet down on its own after the stress has stopped. But since most stress is ongoing, the body is always responding to stress. An uncontrolled increase in adrenalin and cortisol can have a negative affect on health. Over exposure to these and other stress hormones can disrupt almost all your body's processes, increasing your risk of obesity, insomnia, digestive problems, heart disease, depression, memory impairment, physical illnesses and other complications.

A healthy SRS allows reactions that are appropriately gauged to the circumstances: big reactions to big threats; small reactions to small threats.

Furthermore, people who have a sluggish SRS also tend to have more stress responses, more often, to less threatening stimuli; those responses have longer lasting effects on the body. This type of person fumes in a long checkout line, frets in heavy traffic and explodes when the dog gets into the garbage. This person may have a sluggish, but overreactive stress response and a tendency to develop depression.