April is Stress Awareness Month 

 April is Stress Awareness Month 

What is Stress? 

Stress is the adverse reaction we have to excessive pressures or other types of demands.  

These demands can be experienced from relationships, family, friends, a result of poor physical health, excessive workload or the environment within the workplace, personal or business finances or the community we live.   

Stress is a feeling of losing control and becoming overwhelmed and unable to cope, and this affects our everyday life. 

Some stress is beneficial and helps us get through a meeting, marathon or a new situation we haven’t experienced before.  

However, when our stress response is activated repeatedly this results in a permanent state of fight or flight and we are in a constant state of overwhelm and find it difficult to cope or think clearly.  We find we have lost the resilience we once had to cope with even the small things in day to day life. 

Stress is a response to a threat in a situation, anxiety is a reaction to the stress. 

Feeling this overwhelming stress for a prolonged period of time is often called chronic, or long-term stress, and it can have an impact on both mental and physical health and can lead to depression and anxiety. 

Stress has a detrimental effect on your brain and body

The amygdala in the brain is our fight or flight responder (as it’s most commonly known) and is our emotional alarm centre, (or old brain), and when we are faced with a threat or danger the amygdala responds with a message and cortisol (known as the stress hormone) is released in the body to help us with adrenalin to deal with the danger or threat.

This is good initially to give us the ability to act, however when the amygdala is constantly in an emotional or alarm state of fight or flight, the message repeatedly releases cortisol and the body becomes more stressed, our physiology changes and this is registered back in the amygdala and the message repeats like a loop system and the body becomes swamped with cortisol.

Stress has a harmful effect on the brain and the body over a period of time, however we can learn how the brain works and this helps us to understand how we can be mindfully aware of these dangers and learn skills to take action to prevent the stress overwhelm and protect the brain and the body. 

Do you know the effects of Stress & anxiety on your brain and body?

The role of the hypothalamus in the brain is to keep the body in homeostasis as much as possible. It’s role is to manage the body running smoothly.

The hypothalamus acts as the connector between the endocrine system, the pituitary gland and works with the hypothalamus and many other glands in the body to produce hormones, also managing our organs in the body and also the nervous system, and plays an essential part for functions of the body, such as:-

blood pressure and heart rate
body temperature
balancing bodily fluids
sleep cycles 

And much more.

If the body is swamped in cortisol caused by stress, the function of the hypothalamus is compromised and it is unable to keep the body in homeostasis, leading to irregularities in blood pressure, glucose metabolism, inflammatory response, immune function and hormone release, leading to imbalance within the body. 

However we can learn how the brain works and this helps us to understand how we can be mindfully aware of these dangers and learn skills to take action to prevent the stress overwhelm and protect the brain and the body. 

Did you know stress affects your cognitive performance? 

When we become stressed, this has an effect on the hippocampus in the brain. 

  • The hippocampus is our storage/filing area in the brain, it stores and organises our memories, this work mainly takes place when we sleep, therefore it is essential to get a stress free restful night’s sleep for this work to be completed otherwise we may experience poor memory and find it difficult to recall things.
  • The hippocampus has a stress response, and this part of the brain is packed with cortisol receptors. As the Amygdala in the brain sends a message of danger or threat, this releases more cortisol in the body, these receptors in the hippocampus can end up being constantly soaked in cortisol, leading to poor cognitive function. 
  • However we can learn how the brain works and this helps us to understand how we can be mindfully aware of these dangers and learn skills to take action to prevent the stress overwhelm and protect the brain and the body. 
  • Learn skills to be response able (responsible) to manage your stress and anxiety. 

Make an appointment for a free consultation to join this course to Learn New Skills to Manage Stress and Anxiety. 

This is a journey in 4 parts 

1 What stress is, the signs and causes 

2 How the human mind works 

3 How stress affects the brain and the body 

4 Positivity and mind awareness 

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