How Stress Can Affect The Chemistry Of Our Minds And Bodies?

By Author: Williams Tehoy
Total Articles: 10
Comment this article

It sometimes helps to understand stress by understanding the history of the evolution of stress within and outside of the human mind. Claude Bernard, a French pioneering physiologist first helped us to understand how negatives stresses impact us. By doing studies, Bernard proved that specific ideas in reference to dynamic equilibriums could be a constant and steady type of influence that kept the human body going internally. In fact, he believed that our internal parts needed to remain balanced and as such outside or environmental influences could have a negative effect that would result in the need to survive, thus forcing our bodies to react accordingly. Such influences can vary, including negative commentaries, illnesses, predatorily threats, energy loss, oxygen variations and even temperature increases or decreases. However, as you will see by reading about a brief history of stress in this article, stress has been analysed and the resulting factors actually affect the chemistry of our minds and bodies.

Homeostasis was the first attempt by the neurologist, Walter Cannon, to pioneer the definitions connected to ...
... physical and emotional stress type factors. He showed the fight or flight type of response as being something that both people and creatures experienced when faced with stress. His connection to the mental release of neurotransmitters from the brain’s medulla and adrenal gland finally gave an answer to why people react in such a way. His findings showed the medulla releasing adrenaline and norephinephrine neurotransmitters during these responses. Further evidence showed increased physical reactions to stress, not limited to hypervigilence, nervousness, an increase in alertness and a faster heart rate.

Another experiment revealed that constant stresses damage the adrenal gland by making it enlarge, the immune system by slowly breaking it down and the gastrointestinal system by causing ulcers. Further findings indicated that this so-called stress syndrome was a process by which the body and mind appeared ill, but was in fact adapting normally to the stressors. The final conclusion was that despite being a health process for the body to undertake in relation to stress, excessive amounts of any stress would overtax and already taxed system. Thus, stress has been considered since then as bad and any findings of a positive nature regarding the body’s adaptive skills has been set aside by most people.

Good or bad, stress is here to stay and so are our reactions to them because we are constantly evolving to adapt to our world. Yet, as good as our reaction of fight or flight is to stress, danger and risks; we dread the physical and emotional symptoms that are so very natural and normal. So, by understanding the stress syndrome and how stress affects you, dealing with stress by using the information found through years of stress studies can make your life easier. However, this is a brief history of stress and there is still so much for you to learn about stress and the coping skills that you need to combat it, deal with it and overcome it.

William Tehoy, an expert in coping with stress and effects of stress, for more than 30 years, developed control stress program for home use.