Why do we stress?

It’s a great question and could solve a lot of problems but the answer is not simple. We all have stress in our lives but some of us are able to cope with it better than others. These days, our lives are filled with stress. We work in high stress jobs, where we are expected to meet dates and deadlines, we have never ending to-do lists, the price of property is so high that we have to work harder to buy a house, we are constantly bombarded with an overload of information in every area of our life through social media channels, most of it irrelevant to us but we read it anyway and take some of it on board which then causes added stress, we worry about bills and mortgages and petty little disagreements, we get sick because we have been too stressed and then we get stressed about being sick. Life has become so fast-paced that it can be hard to unwind and we live our lives being stressed and possibly not knowing that we are stressed because we have accepted it as normal. Stress stores in our body, making it hard to relax, hard to keep healthy and hard to maintain sanity. Most of us don’t even know how to relax or what relaxing should feel like because we have never truly done it.

What does it mean to have stress in your body?

First lets determine exactly what stress is. Stress is your body’s way of dealing with threats to your wellbeing. In the cave man days, a form of stress would have been getting chased by a wild animal. When this happened the cave man had 2 choices: he could fight the wild animal or he could run from it. He had to use his brain to recognise the threat by thinking about it: that an animal was chasing him. Thinking about a threat or demand, then creates a chain reaction in your body, as it signals your body to release stress hormones and get ready to run or to fight. This is our fight or flight response. Back in those days, once the wild animal had gone, the stress was over and the perceived danger was removed. Your body would have functioned perfectly to keep you safe and then gone back into balance and continued its normal ways. There was no high stress, overthinking about deadlines and bills, there were no worries or constant bombardment of media, so the cave man just went back to living life and therefore his stress hormones went back into balance. That’s what your stress response is for, it is to keep you safe from a perceived threat to your wellbeing.

Our bodies still work in this same way: we use our brains to recognise a stress, a reaction then happens in our body and stress hormones are released. We go into fight or flight, so we are ready to fight or ready to run, which means we are ready to deal with the stress. The problem these days, is that stress is constant and we don’t simply go back to living a stress free life and wait for the next wild animal encounter before getting stressed again. Our bodies will prepare for fight or flight with any perceived stress. A perceived stress is anything that your brain recognises as a threat to your wellbeing, so stress can be different for everyone. While one person may find paying bills stressful, another person may find that completely stress free. That means that if you are constantly thinking about something that worries you, your body is constantly preparing for fight or flight because it perceives a threat to your wellbeing. Lets use paying bills as an example. You receive a bill, the deadline to pay the bill is in a month’s time and you are low on money at the moment, so don’t know how you are going to actually pay the bill. You start to think about it and your brain recognises that this a stress for you and it may affect your wellbeing, your body only knows stress as a perceived threat, so it gets ready to keep you safe by running or fighting (remember fight or flight from the caveman) so it triggers a chain reaction and releases stress hormones so that you are able to deal with the stress. You still have a whole month before the bill needs to be paid but you are still thinking about it and coming up with possible solutions of getting the money to pay it. Lets say 3 weeks go by and you are still thinking about paying the bill, you probably let it enter your mind a few times a day and spend a couple of minutes thinking about it and trying to come up with solutions. Every time you think about it, you trigger the release of stress hormones. So that’s a few times per day but that’s only for that one particular stress. If you have other perceived stresses in your life and you think about them as well, then you are triggering your fight or flight response at other times during the day. Lets say for example that a loved one is sick. So now you are thinking about paying your bill on time and you are thinking about a sick loved one. You thought about the bill a few times in the day and now we are adding the stress of your sick loved one. You think about that a few times per day as well and every time you think about it, your body perceives a threat to your wellbeing and releases stress hormones. Then there are your work deadlines, getting to places on time, preparing dinner for your family, picking up the kids from school and the list of modern day stresses can go on forever but every time you think about a perceived threat, your body gets prepared.

What we need to be aware of is that every time we think about a perceived stress, our bodies will respond accordingly. The price we pay for thinking about stress, focusing on stress and worrying about things, is that are stress hormones stay elevated. We live on high adrenaline and cortisol and we remain in fight or flight. A lot of people in our times, may have lived their whole lives in fight or flight and not even realise because stress these days is so constant and we have become accustomed to living life in this way, believing that it is normal.

The price we pay for doing this is poor health and we are beginning to realise this. When we live our lives in a state of constant stress and our stress hormones remain high, we can experience a range of poor health symptoms including high blood pressure, insomnia, infertility, weight loss or gain, cancer, allergies and the list goes on. We can basically experience any poor health condition due to chronic stress because your body’s main focus is removing you from the perceived danger (think back to the caveman) and anything other than this becomes secondary. Basically we are in survival mode and being in survival mode can have a range of other problems as well, like using alcohol or drugs as a form of escape and a form of dealing with the perceived stress, this again decreases our health. The bottom line here is that chronic stress can cause any illness without you even realising how it happened. Have you ever heard someone say “but I exercise and eat right and I was diagnosed with cancer”? or “I have been trying to have a baby for 3 years and I have unexplained infertility” Did you ask that person if they are exposed to chronic stress putting their whole out of balance? See it’s not something that we commonly recognise and believe but its still can cause any illness in your body and if you were to as someone that, they would be highly offended because it is likely that they have accepted stress as normal.

So what do we do about it?

Basically, we have to stop worrying and constantly thinking about our perceived threats in a negative way. We need to focus on changed thinking to relieve stress. If we go back to the example of paying the bill on time, rather than worry about it and think about how to pay the bill, we can train our mind to think about the situation in a positive way. We can focus on how blessed we are and how lucky we are that we have enough money to pay most of the other bills, or lets say its an electricity bill, we could focus on how lucky we are to have electricity. By changing our thinking, we change our body’s response and decrease stress. When we are less stresses, we are better at finding solutions, so you could find an easy and quicker solution to paying the bill if you focus on the positive statements because your mind will be clearer and your body will feel more balanced.

Exercise helps us to decrease our stress and is also good for us for numerous reasons, however in relation to stress, exercise produces endorphins, which reduce stress. Exercises such as yoga and pilates, where the focus is on breathing, have the added benefit of encouraging you to remain present and focused without your mind wandering. Spending time in nature and/or salt water helps us to decrease stress. Studies have shown that nature reduces anger, fear and stress and encourages our presence, which increases positive feelings. When we spend time in nature or salt water, we absorb negative ions and without going into too much complicated chemistry, these negative ions create positive feelings within us. Nature was made for us to make the most of, so make the most of it.

Mindfulness activities have become very popular in the last decade because when we are mindful and focusing on that present moment only, we diminish the thoughts of stress, giving our bodies a chance at balancing or lowering our stress hormones. When we are mindful, we give our bodies a chance at rebalancing because the perceived threat is gone, as it doesn’t live in that one moment. When you catch yourself thinking about something stressful or worrying about something, bring your focus back to the present moment and focus on your current breath. You could do this hundreds of times a day and eventually it may become a habit, just the same as worrying is current habit. We can retrain our brains to become present.

Becoming less stressed can take time and effort but it will be worth it for your mental and physical health in the long run. Start monitoring your thoughts and every time you catch yourself stressing, bring yourself back to the present moment or start to reverse your thinking about the perceived stress. Over time you will notice a difference.

You can also include naturopathic herbs into your healthcare routine that are specifically focused on helping your body to rebalance itself during stressful times. A naturopath can prescribe you herbal medicines for stress, anxiety and a whole range of mental health issues. A Theta Healing session could also help to decrease stress, as the session can help you to identify where your stress began and how it serves you, giving you clarity and helping you to develop new belief systems.

If you are feeling stressed and would like some support to balance your body, your mind and your health, get in touch. If you mention that read this post, you will receive 20% of your first session.