The Essentials of How We Stress

Stress is generally thought of as being all bad. We associate it with feeling up-tight, uneasy, nervous, distracted, possibly sick, but generally miserable. Stress is just a fact of life, but how you respond to it is most important.

What is stress? It is anything that causes your body to change the way it is functioning right now. This involves more than just feeling frustrated, anxious, or pressed for time.

Although we tend to think of stress as purely emotional, life is a never ending series of three types of stress: Physical Stress, Nutritional Stress and Emotional Stress. The body is designed to survive all three types of stress.

Physical Stress comes from an actual threat of injury to your body. Physical activity and physical accidents put a stress on your body. Given time, your body will repair exercise injuries in a short time. Although physical trauma may leave a scar of some sort, it does not impose long-term stress on the body. Take care of immediate needs of physical stress, then return to life as usual. Physical stress is short term.

Pain in the human body

Emotional Stress comes from within. It originates in your conscious mind, your feelings, beliefs, memories, attitudes toward people and events in your life. Emotional Stress comes from your responses to events around you. You can suffer emotional stress along with physical stress. Being physically attacked, in a bad car accident, or another type of traumatic accident can create emotional stress long after the physical stress subsides. As long as your emotional stress continues, your physiology must adapt to handle it. These adaptations are conditions such as high blood pressure. You do not always have a choice about the situation, but you do have a choice about how your respond to the situation.

Nutritional Stress goes hand-in-hand with eating and drinking. Your body reacts to everything that enters it-an apple, a juicy hamburger, a vitamin, a prescription pill, cigarette smoke, city smog and even water. Either way, your body must handle it. If you eat an apple and the body doesn’t “handle” it, then it would rot and ferment. You would be in trouble. Putting the least amount of stress on the body is ideal; so the easier it is for the body to “handle” what enters it, the less undue stress is put on the body. Make healthy choices with what you choose to eat and drink.

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine by thy food” -Hippocrates

Stress itself isn’t a problem, the way you deal with stress and for how long you deal with stress is the problem. Your response to stress is key. Your response determines how you feel mentally and physically. You have no control over how your body will respond to certain stimuli, however you can control the stimuli that prompt the responses- mainly your actions and thoughts.

Dr. Sarah Morter Rowden, D.C.

Dr. Josh Rowden, D.C.

5300 South Southern Hills Court

Suite 200, Rogers, AR 72758

479-636-1324