Understanding Stress

You might notice some of these things feel more in our control than others. It’s important to figure out if your stressor is or isn’t in your control so then you can decide how to deal with it.

Regardless of the type of stressor, when we experience something stressful, our brain wakes up our body to respond. Our responses happen in mainly 3 ways:

These reactions are instinctual, meaning they will happen automatically, without much thinking.

Our Fight reaction is when we go for it and deal with our stressful situation head on.

Our Flight reaction is when we feel panicked and leave the situation. We either don’t feel like dealing with it, or are unable to deal with it.

Our Freeze reaction is when our stress takes over, and we can’t really react at all. Like when our brain freezes in the middle of a test and we forget all the answers!

We might not enjoy the feeling of these stress responses, but our human species is actually alive BECAUSE of how we’ve learned to adapt to stress.

Essentially, these automatic stress responses have evolved as a survival mechanism, allowing animals and people to react quickly to life-threatening situations.

Scientists say stress comes from our lizard brain!

No, no, we don’t mean the brain of lizards. We’re talking about the oldest part of the human brain that our ancestors had even in hunter-gatherer times. It controls most of our automatic functioning like breathing, balance, coordination, and eating!

When we encounter a stressful situation or stressor, our body releases the hormone adrenaline, which signals to our brain to wake out body up to react to the stressor.

Adrenaline causes:

• Faster breathing
• Faster heartbeat
• Alertness
• Sweating
• Needing to go to the bathroom
• Decreased appetite

Our body also releases the hormone cortisol as a response to a stressor, which keeps our body in this active state and ready to respond until the stressor goes away.

You might be wondering – why is it so important to know about all these complicated reactions and hormones?

Firstly, some of you may be interested in learning more about the body and the way our brain works. And secondly, so we can understand that the effects of stress are actually based on a real and powerful reaction going on in our bodies and minds, so we can’t always just ignore it and hope it goes away.

The good thing about acute stress is that we are only experiencing these symptoms for a short amount of time, so our body can cope with it well. There aren’t any major effects on our health from acute stress.

But what about chronic stress?

When we encounter stress, cortisol and adrenaline can stay in our body for hours after a stressful experience.

That means, our body stays activated and experiences the symptoms of stress for a while. After the stressor is gone, these hormone levels usually go down and we begin to relax again.

However, when we experience chronic stress, our stressor isn’t going away, so our cortisol and adrenaline levels stay high and we begin to feel distressed for days or even weeks.

After all that stress, we might experience negative effects on our health and body, or even burn-out.

This is when we become exhausted and have a hard time getting things done because of how tired we are.

Too much stress is a bad thing, and the effects chronic stress has on our body and mind can be very harmful. It can result in:

• Damage to blood vessels
• Increased blood pressure
• Weight gain/increased appetite, or weight loss/lack of appetite
• Feeling tired, exhausted, or drained
• Panic attacks or anxiety
• Depression
• Stomach pain, stomach ulcers, or nausea
• Immune system problems
• Injuries taking longer to heal (even paper cuts!)
• Trigger asthma attacks

WOW – That sounds pretty scary right?

Don’t worry, remember that these are just long-term or chronic effects of stress. It can take weeks, months, years or very serious situations to experience these effects.

It is also important to know that stress isn’t always a bad thing!

Wait – WHAT?! Stress isn’t always a bad thing?!

While too much stress is something to definitely watch out for, acute stress can actually be a good thing!

Can you think of a time where stress has been a good thing? Or a time where stress has either helped you or resulted in something good happening?

That’s right – a little bit of stress can help motivate us to get things done, stay on track, and push us to do our best!

Without stress, we might not feel the need to practice for a sports tournament, or study for a quiz.

Remember – Stress isn’t something to be feared. We need optimal stress, or just enough stress to get something done. We don’t want too little stress that we are not motivated or too much stress that we have a hard time dealing with something.

As you can see, stress is kind of a big deal when it comes to maintaining mental health and wellbeing.

We gave you A LOT of info here, so we encourage you to check your learning and never hesitate to come back and check this section out again whenever you need a reminder.

Now that we talked all about what stress is , what things cause stress, the symptoms of stress, it’s time to learn how you can deal with stress!

As we continue on this learning journey, we hope to support you by providing new ways to recognize when your stress is too much and what kind of strategies are out there so you can de-stress!