What is stress?

Stress and your body
Stress puts you into a 'fight or flight' mode. First, stress hormones including adrenaline and cortisol flood the body, causing:

• Your body's need for oxygen to increase
• Your heart rate and blood pressure to go up
• The blood vessels in your skin to constrict
• Your muscles to tense
• Your blood sugar level to increase
• Your blood to have an increased tendency to clot
• Your body's cells to pour stored fat into the bloodstream

Serious illnesses
All of these can strain your heart and artery linings, so much so that if you already have coronary heart disease, stress might make you feel chest pain, called angina. The increased tendency for the blood to clot may predispose some people to develop a clot in their coronary arteries, causing a heart attack. The tendency for your bowel and intestinal muscles to constrict, also due to a sudden release of adrenaline, can lead to stomach problems. In addition, it can precipitate a number of mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. Stress doesn't cause these mental illnesses, but it can activate these brain disorders in people who may already be prone to them.

Toxic weight
Stress can cause 'toxic weight'. Cortisol is a powerful appetite 'trigger'. That's no surprise if you've found that you eat more - and less-than-healthy food - when you're under a lot of stress. Those extra calories are converted to fat deposits that gravitate to your waistline. Fat deposits around the abdomen - the 'apple-shaped' figure versus the 'pear-shaped figure' - are associated with life-threatening illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and cancer. Chronically high levels of cortisol actually stimulate the fat cells inside the abdomen to fill with more fat. As you age, your expanding waistline can be life threatening.

Other problems
Too much stress can also affect your immune system, weakening it and making you more susceptible to colds, coughs and infections.

Some physical symptoms of stress include feeling anxious, depressed or irritable, muscular tension, headaches and gastrointestinal illnesses.

Stress triggers
Stress can be caused by both external and internal factors, some you can control and others you can't, for example:
Changes in your life

• Trauma or crises
• Small daily hassles
• Conflicts or unpleasant people
• Barriers that prevent you from reaching your goals
• Feeling little control over your life
• Excessive or impossible demands
• Noise
• Boring or lonely work
• Irrational ideas about how things should or must be; perceiving that life is not unfolding as you think it should
• Believing you are helpless or can't handle a situation
• Drawing faulty conclusions like 'they don't like me' or 'I'm inferior to them', or having unreasonable fears of dire events such as 'I'll be mugged'
• Pushing yourself to excel and/or failing to achieve a desired goal
• Assigning fault for bad events, for example, placing blame on yourself or on others
• Realising you may have been wrong but wanting to be right
• Overreacting to current stress as a result of intense stress years earlier, especially in childhood

  Stress is an individualised experience. What may be stressful to you may not affect someone else.