The Noom Mindset by Noom

Author:Noom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S/Simon Element
Published: 2022-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

Mastering Stress Management

The fourth Pillar of Health is stress management, and it’s a biggie. Stress—that response to pressure, adversity, danger, or just life overload—can make everything in life more difficult. Our bodies are designed to handle stress—short-term stress, that is. But when stress never lets up, it can break the body down.

“Stress isn’t always a bad thing,” says Dr. Michaelides. “People think of the word ‘stress’ as negative, but it’s a physiological function and part of our internal radar for danger. It’s when stress goes too far or goes on for too long that it becomes a problem.”

The stress response has a purpose. When your brain senses a threat, it switches into sympathetic nervous system mode and you release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones cause physical changes that help you either fight the threat or run away from it, which is why sympathetic nervous system mode is called fight-or-flight. When you are in fight-or-flight mode, your body diverts blood to muscles so you can be stronger and run faster. Your vision and hearing get sharper for maximum threat detection, and your heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure all increase. Your liver releases more glucose for energy, and all your reflexes get quicker. Basically, you temporarily turn into a superhero.

But here’s the important part: When the threat is gone—you fought, or you fled, or you jumped out of the way of the speeding car, or you saved someone’s life, or you finished your presentation or your test, or you had that tough conversation—your brain senses that the threat has passed and switches back into parasympathetic nervous system mode. Blood returns to your internal organs, your muscles relax, your heart rate and breathing slow down, and you get back to normal—and maybe take a nap. This is why parasympathetic mode is called “rest and digest.”

What isn’t supposed to happen, Dr. Michaelides explains, is that you stay in sympathetic nervous system mode, or fight-or-flight, all the time. Our bodies are made to be superheroes once in a while, for short periods of time, but then we need to recover from all that effort so we can get back to baseline and feel like ourselves again—not superheroes, but pretty awesome nonetheless because we are calm, cool, and collected.

If we don’t get that recovery time, stress can become chronic, and the stress response system can become overly sensitive and hyper-reactive, mounting a stress response to all kinds of situations that aren’t dangerous. That’s not good for health. Or, as scientists say, this is maladaptive.35 When stress hormones like cortisol hang out in the bloodstream for too long, metabolism can slow down,36 which can cause the body to store more calories as fat rather than burning them off. It can increase blood sugar and insulin levels,37 which should rise when you need more instant energy but which shouldn’t stay high all the time. This can increase hunger, overeating, and can even damage organs over time. It can increase inflammation and interfere with a healthy immune response.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.