The importance of understanding the nature of your stress system.

But what if you aren’t under any pressure? What if the strain at work isn’t so high, your personal connections are healthy, and you have enough of money? Does that suggest everything is going to be okay? Almost certainly not. Sadly, many other components of our contemporary lifestyles also create symptoms that are comparable to those caused by stress. Technology and artificial lighting are two examples that illustrate this point. To use the precise terminology, these external cues are referred to as zeitgebers. The brain is designed to use these zeitgebers to determine its own biological rhythms, including the sleep-wake cycle (circadian rhythm).

The production of stress hormones

In reality, this causes the body to release hormones associated with stress at particular periods throughout the day. This is due to the fact that hormones produced in response to stress are one of the mechanisms that the body employs in order to rouse itself from sleep. The production of stress hormones such as cortisol and norepinephrine causes activity to be triggered in the brain. This activity causes you to awaken from your sleep and become completely alert. However, if you leave the light on in the evening or glance at your phone in the evening, this may promote the production of stress hormones at a time when you should be trying to rest.

This ensures that you will continue to feel awake and prevents your brain from having time to recuperate.

Everything on the internet and on television is designed to grab our attention and pull us this way and that is another factor that does not help the situation. It has been shown that this can cause effects similar to ADHD over the long term and makes it more difficult for us to concentrate on any one thing for an extended period of time.

SEE ALSO THIS ARTICLE ABOUT THE “TECHNO STRESS”

The Mechanisms Behind the Physiological Changes That Cause Stress

The situation described above is only one illustration of how stress is totally the product of the circumstances that exist in your life or even of your own thoughts. Instead, stress can be the result of factors from the outside world that have a physical impact on you.

Consider it in this way for an other perspective:

Sensations of the body come first, followed by feelings, emotions, thoughts, and then behaviors. That is to suggest that your feelings are almost always the outcome of anything bodily influencing your physiology, and that this is very often the case. For instance, if you are in a cooler climate, this causes an increase in both the quantity of cortisol and the amount of norepinephrine that your body produces. This is the same as low-level stress on the body, which is why taking a shower in cold water is such an effective technique to wake oneself up in the morning.

Relation between stress and state of mind

So, let’s for instance consider factors such as being exposed to extreme cold for an extended period of time. That alone might make you sick because the stress response weakens your immune system.
In a similar vein, if you are hungry, you will experience a physiological form of stress as a result of this. In essence, because of a drop in blood sugar, hunger triggers the production of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain. When there is not enough sugar in the blood, the body releases cortisol, and the response is the same as it would be to any other form of stress.

Why? Because this presents some kind of risk to the body, we cannot ignore the significance of this fact. If you are starving, you need to get moving and go out into the world to look for something to eat so that you can satisfy your hunger. The hormone responsible for hunger, ghrelin, is released along with cortisol and myostatin, which are responsible for the breakdown of tissue in order to give energy. On the other side, this results in a sharp increase in your blood sugar after you have eaten something. This will, in turn, lead you to release insulin, which will absorb the sugar so that it can be used by the body elsewhere (either in the muscles and brain, or to be stored as fat).

The “feel good” hormone

Tryptophan, which is present in the majority of foods but is not absorbed by the body, is one of the substances that is eliminated as a side effect of this process. Because it is a “precursor” to serotonin, tryptophan travels all the way through the circulatory system until it reaches the brain. Once there, it is able to pass through the blood brain barrier and begin the process of converting into serotonin. The ‘feel good hormone’ serotonin is also a precursor, in this case to the sleep hormone melatonin. Melatonin is responsible for inducing sleep.

This is the reason why, after eating a large meal, people typically feel full, followed by joyful, and finally tired. Do you remember what you ate for Christmas dinner?
The opposite of the stress response is the relaxation response. This is the “rest and digest” response. And this is yet another cycle that your body goes through on a consistent basis: it goes from the state of being ready to fight or flee to the state of being ready to relax and digest. You just don’t notice this because, in an ideal world, that shift will be slight, and you won’t feel it very much at all. Therefore, you just don’t notice it.

CALM THE STRESS WITH THIS RELAXING MUSIC

You simply travel slightly up and down the spectrum, becoming somewhat more alert and focused and then little less so. This continues until you reach the desired state. Despite this, the continual shifts in your environment do have an effect on aspects of your life such as your level of productivity and your mood. In addition to this, it is intimately connected to the cycle of sleeping and waking up. After sleeping through the night, for example, your body is in a state of fasting when you get up; as a result, your cortisol levels are very high.