Stress and Health: The True Effects by Jerry Brainum 6/22

 

 

 While we are often told of the importance of avoiding stress to maintain health, such a suggestion is more easily said than followed. You cannot be alive and entirely avoid stress because stress is expressed in many forms. Indeed, there is so-called "good stress," which is termed "eustress," which results when something good happens to you. For example, if you win $800 million in the Powerball lottery, you will immediately undergo involuntary stress reactions in the body. Some of the same hormones that modify more damaging forms of stress are secreted even under beneficial conditions. But this short-term surge of "stress hormones" causes no lasting health effects because it's more of an acute, rather than a chronic or long-lasting effect. Scientists who study the effects of stress on the body agree that it's long-term, unyielding stress that causes the greatest degree of health damage. Such long-term chronic stress can gradually damage vital organs, including both the heart and brain, and in doing so pave the way to chronic disease that can shorten lifespan.

But again, how stress affects you depends on the underlying cause of the stress. For example, if you are a bodybuilder or an athlete the regular training that you undergo is a definite form of stress. Without applying a certain degree of stress to working muscles, the muscles would never grow or undergo hypertrophy. The body strives to maintain homeostasis, which is a fancy way of saying that unless you push the body by applying stress, the body will stay the same. But there is a caveat to that rule. Not exercising at all is ironically a different form of stress because the body, especially the muscles are made for movement, and without that movement, they atrophy. This has come to light in recent years with the finding that excessive sitting for hours at a time imposes a type of stress in blood vessels that causes them to break down. Actually, it's the lack of movement that adversely affects blood vessels. When muscles contract they promote a greater degree of localized stress in blood vessels. The vessels sense the need for greater blood flow and respond by promoting the release of nitric oxide within blood vessels. Nitric oxide or NO works by dilating blood vessels and thus increasing blood flow while also lowering blood pressure. But a little-known secondary effect of NO is that it helps to maintain the suppleness or flexibility of blood vessels. That's important because flexible blood vessels are less likely to be afflicted with atherosclerosis, a primary cause of cardiovascular disease. But the key point is that NO is released as a result of stress imposed on the lining of blood vessels. This is a good example of beneficial stress.

How stress affects your health depends on how you perceive the stress. For example, years ago I took a job at the . . .