How does stress impact your health? Here's the biology that explains the stress response...

Stress has a massive impact on your health – in fact, your stress levels and health are intricately linked. That’s why it’s so important to take a moment every day to relax, breathe, chill and focus on something other than our highly intense jobs, lives and busy-ness.

This is an area I’ve worked on more and more myself in recent years, after realising that a lot of my physical issues (IBS for a start) were related to that fact that I rarely took the time to stop and just BE, rather than DO.

It’s all to do with your biology and physiology… so prepare yourself for a little biology lesson folks!

We have something called our autonomic nervous system which manages certain functions inside our body, and it does this unconsciously.  We never actually think about our heart beating, or our digestion, or our immune system, they just work for us, without any conscious thought.

This autonomic nervous system has two sides to it – the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.

The sympathetic nervous system controls the high energy, busy, stressful side of our lives.  It controls our fight or flight (or freeze) response which helps us survive when we’re threatened or in a dangerous situation.  Obviously this was very useful way back when we needed to quickly respond to scary situations, like if we came across a sabre-toothed tiger, we’d fight (erm, probably not very wise!), or run away (flight), or freeze (again, probably not useful when faced with a tiger, but you get my point).

Nowadays, the sympathetic nervous system gives us energy for a workout, or helps us push through on busy and hectic days, giving us the energy to keep going.

However, when your sympathetic nervous system (let’s call is SNS for now) is switched on, you actually switch off the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). This is the part of your nervous system that controls your healing, calming, digestive system, immune system and sleep!

For optimum health and to feel your very best, you need a good balance of both your SNS and PNS.  We need our SNS to be physically active, for exercise and to occasionally push through busy patches, but we also need good sleep and periods of recovery (for healing, digestion and immune system function).

The problem is that nowadays, most people spend too much time with the SNS switched on, high energy, avoiding sleep, pushing through with 14 hour days at work… what you’re doing is you switch OFF your immune system, your ability to digest properly, to heal, and create the anti-bodies that you need.  So high stress, in the long run, results in you being less able to heal yourself, digest your food, and you’ll probably get sick a lot too.

When you understand that one side switches off the other side, you can understand why a very stressful environment can lead to long term health implications.  A lot of long term chronic illnesses are due to this – we are too stressed – because we’ve switched off our body’s ability to heal and digest our food properly.

So, to feel and look healthy, we need to take time every day to relax, unwind and take time for the healing/digesting/calming side of your body to actually work.