By Jennifer Fiorillo
Mental Health
Jennifer Fiorillo
Living with the pressures of our day-to-day and meeting the expectations of people and things can stretch us thin and can become overwhelming. We exist in a culture where high demands and high stress are considered the norm, and we have become accustomed to being in a constant state of motion. Couple this pace with the challenges of life such as illness, financial hardship, loss of loved ones and external events that put us on high alert, and we can very well find ourselves in a chronic state of stress.
While stress at times can help us avoid potentially life-threatening situations through the fight-or-flight response, its long-term impact on our body and mind can be damaging. It is well understood that chronic stress can lead to or contribute to a number of health-related issues.
The American Institute of Stress outlines the many ways that too much stress impacts the body, including increasing blood pressure, producing extra blood sugar that can increase risk for type 2 diabetes, causing headaches, body aches and back and shoulder pain from the tightening of muscles, and weakening of the immune system when the stress hormone, cortisol, stays high.
The fight-or-flight response is your brain’s reaction to an acute stressor that begins in the amygdala of the brain. The amygdala sends a signal to the hypothalamus, which regulates body functions such as heart rate. When the sympathetic nervous system kicks in, adrenaline is released to prepare someone to respond to the stressor, which also results in the release of cortisol. Cortisol’s role is to help a person manage a stressful situation, but with prolonged and chronic stress, cortisol levels stay high and can cause the brain’s hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis to not function properly. The HPA axis helps to keep the sympathetic nervous system working in acute stress.
Research has shown that brain size, emotional regulation and memory can be impacted by prolonged stress. Sonya J. Lupien in 2018 pointed out a number of studies and research around the ways that brain function is negatively affected by stress in her review in Frontiers of Neuroendocrinology. Chronic stress can make you more prone to mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression, and it has been shown to impact problem-solving, decision making and the ability to retain information. There is also evidence that chronic stress can be linked to a higher likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
There are many strategies that can be used to reduce the effects of chronic stress on our body and brain. Some of these include mindfulness-based stress reduction to increase mindfulness through yoga and meditation, breathing exercises, a proper sleep schedule, social connectedness and using laughter/humor. Understanding areas of one’s life that can be organized at work or home is helpful to feel more in control when the uncontrollable occurs. Doing this helps to balance out the stressful impact of what may be out of our hands and left to the universe to manage.
Jennifer Fiorillo, MBA, MPH is the president and CEO of Bridges Healthcare in Milford, and may be reached at Jfiorillo@bridgesmilford.org.