Stress Keeps Us Living in Survival Mode; Reason You Should Avoid Long-term Stress.

Stress is one of the biggest causes of epigenetic change because it knocks your body out of balance.

It comes in three forms: physical stress (trauma), chemical stress (toxins), and emotional stress (fear, worry, being overwhelmed, and so on).

Each type can set off more than 1,400 chemical reactions and produce more than 30 hormones and neurotransmitters.

Also Read: How Stress Affects Your Heart Health.

When that chemical cascade of stress hormones is triggered, your mind influences your body through the autonomic nervous system and you experience the ultimate mind-body connection.

Ironically, feeling stressed was designed to be adaptive.

All organisms in nature, including humans, are programmed to deal with short-term stress so that they’ll have the resources they need for emergencies.

When you sense a threat in your external environment, the fight-or-flight response in your sympathetic nervous system (a subsystem of your autonomic nervous system) is activated, and your heart rate and blood pressure increase, your muscles tense, and hormones like adrenaline and cortisol shoot through your body to prepare you to either flee or face your foe in battle.

If you’re being chased by a pack of wild, hungry wolves or a party of violent warriors, and you outrun them, your body will return to homeostasis (its normal, balanced state) soon after you reach safety.

That’s the way our bodies were designed to operate when we’re living in survival mode.

The body is out of balance but only for a short period, until the danger passes.

At least, that’s how it was meant to be.

The same thing happens in our modern world, although the setting is usually a little different.

If someone cuts you off when you’re driving on the highway, you might be momentarily frightened, but once you realize that you’re okay and you let go of the fear of having an accident, your body returns to normal unless that was only one of the countless stressful situations you stumbled into that day.

If you’re like most people, a string of nerve-racking incidents keeps you in fight-or-flight response and out of homeostasis a large part of the time.

Also Read: Emotional burnout, causes, symptoms, and how to recover from emotional burnout.

Maybe the car cutting you off is the only actual life-threatening situation you encounter all day, but the traffic on the way to work, the pressure of preparing for a big presentation, the argument you had with your spouse, the credit card bill that came in the mail, the crashing of your computer hard drive, and the new grey hair you noticed in the mirror keep the stress hormones circulating in your body on a near-constant basis.

Between remembering stressful experiences from the past and anticipating stressful situations coming up in your future, all these repetitive short-term stresses blur together into long-term stress.

Welcome to the 21st-century version of living in survival mode.

In fight-or-flight mode, life-sustaining energy is mobilized so that the body can either run or fight.

But when there isn’t a return to homeostasis (because you keep perceiving a threat), vital energy is lost in the system.

You have less energy in your internal environment for cell growth and repair, long-term building projects on a cellular level, and healing when that energy is being channelled elsewhere.

The cells shut down, they no longer communicate with one another, and they become “selfish.”

It’s not time for routine maintenance (let alone for making improvements); it’s time for defense.

It’s every cell for itself, so the collective community of cells working together becomes fractured.

The immune and endocrine systems (among others) become weakened as genes in those related cells are compromised when informational signals from outside the cells are turned off.

- Also Read: WHEN GOOD STRESS TURNS BAD.

It’s like living in a country where 98 percent of the resources go toward defense, and nothing is left for schools, libraries, road building and repair, communication systems, growing food, and so on.

Roads develop potholes that aren’t fixed.

Schools suffer budget cuts, so students wind up learning less.

Social welfare programs that take care of the poor and the elderly have to close down.

And there’s not enough food to feed the masses.

Not surprisingly, then, long-term stress has been linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, memory loss, insomnia, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, cancer, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, colds, flu, aging acceleration, allergies, body pain, chronic fatigue, infertility, impotence, asthma, hormonal issues, skin rashes, hair loss, muscle spasms, and diabetes, to name just a few conditions (all of which, by the way, are the result of epigenetic changes).

No organism in nature is designed to withstand the effects of long-term stress.

Several studies give strong evidence to show how epigenetic instructions for healing shut down during emergencies.

For example, researchers at the Ohio State University Medical Center found that more than 170 genes were affected by stress, with 100 of them shutting off completely (including many that directly make proteins to facilitate the proper type of wound healing).

The researchers reported that wounds of stressed patients took 40 percent longer to heal and that “stress tilted the genomic balance towards genes [that were] encoding proteins responsible for cell-cycle arrest, death, and inflammation.”

Another study examining the genes of 100 citizens of Detroit zeroed in on 23 subjects who were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

- Also Read: TAKE A NATURE PILL TO BEAT STRESS.

These people had six to seven times more epigenetic variations, most of which involved compromising the immune system.

Researchers at the UCLA AIDS Institute found that not only did HIV spread faster in patients who were the most stressed, but also the higher a patient’s stress level, the less he or she responded to the antiretroviral drugs.

The drugs worked four times better for those patients who were relatively calm, compared to those whose blood pressure, skin moisture, and resting heart rate indicated they were feeling the most stress.

Also Read: Avoid Mosquito Bites to Prevent Dengue Fever.

Based on these findings, researchers concluded that the nervous system has a direct effect on viral replication.

Although the fight-or-flight response was originally highly adaptive (because it kept early humans alive), it’s now clear that the longer that survival system is constantly activated, the longer your body shunts its resources for creating optimal health, so the system becomes maladaptive.

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