Stress and It’s Effect On the Immune System
It’s safe to say that the United States is experiencing a period of extremely high stress levels: illness, shortages, financial downturns, social isolation (or excess, if you have kids), grief and loss. You name it, we have it. The problem is that stress begets stress. It can snowball into a very unpleasant companion in your already chaotic life.
Our bodies are made to deal with stress, and in certain scenarios this reaction can be very beneficial. Our sympathetic nervous system, or SNS, alerts our body to crank up the stress hormones, allowing us to pull people from burning cars and grab a child before she gets hit by a car. After our heroic action, the parasympathetic nervous system, or PNS, calms us down after the fight-or-flight hormones are no longer needed. Unfortunately, as we get older, our stress system becomes unbalanced. We continue to pump out the cortisol, endorphins, and other hormones that allow us to perform stressful tasks, but our ability to reign those hormones in decreases.
The hormones secreted by the SNS cause problems for our bodies. We gain fat and increase our risk of diabetes, lose our sex drives and our sleep, and we get sick. Because constant stress chronically raises our blood pressure, sugar, and cholesterol, we find ourselves with heart disease. Because it can affect our calcium stores and absorption ability, we lose bone strength. We lose brain capacity through a process called glucocorticoid toxicity. And, pertinent to the current pandemic, stress negatively affects the immune system. A meta-analysis of over 300 studies regarding stress and immune system function in 2004 by Drs. Sergerstrom and Miller found that long term stress caused a weakening of all elements of the immune system.
So, how do we combat the effects of stress, especially when the world seems bent on increasing it? There are many tangible ways to do so, but as with many things, they need to be intentional. The new few blog posts will explore a few effective ways to lower stress levels.
