The impact of stress and trauma is different for everyone. One’s body and mind might react in different ways to the constant barrage of environmental and internal stresses. Everyone has stress or trauma in their lives, some more frequently than others, and some have a harder time coping with it than others.
Anxiety is a sensation of worry and concern, whereas stress can be caused by anything that can have you feeling frustrated, angry, or worried. Researchers have found that exposure to traumatic events can increase the risk of developing physical health issues, especially those that remain over time. This can be due to the fact that trauma can have both short-term and long-term effects on your body.
You could also have suffered physical harm as a result of the stress or trauma. Physical sickness can increase feelings of stress and anxiety, which can make it more challenging to recover from traumatic experiences.
Impact of Stress and Trauma on Health
Chronic stress causes long-term increases in cortisol, disrupting practically every body system. Here are some of the ways that prolonged stress and trauma show physically.
Upsets Blood Sugar Balance
The way in which your body consumes energy might be negatively impacted by prolonged exposure to stress. Your body relies mostly on glucose for fuel, and it exerts a lot of effort to maintain a delicate equilibrium between the two levels. Cells, on the other hand, become less responsive to insulin, the hormone that controls blood sugar levels in your body, when they are subjected to persistent stress.
Insulin resistance elevates blood sugar, and it may cause type 2 diabetes. According to the findings of certain studies, having a high-stress level throughout one’s lifetime is associated with an increased likelihood of getting type 2 diabetes.
Puts the Heart’s Health at Risk
When you’re under pressure, your cardiovascular system, including your heart and blood vessels, suffers. Stress that lasts for an extended period of time causes your body to become more inflamed, which in turn causes damage to the blood vessels and can lead to heart disease.
Chronic stress, like diabetes, increases the likelihood of developing heart disease. Even though your body’s reaction to stress and trauma keeps you safe, it is not designed to do so indefinitely.
Reduces Immune System strength
It’s possible that someone told you that when you’re stressed out, you’re more likely to get sick, and that’s because it’s true. The immune system is suppressed when chemicals linked to stress response, especially cortisol, are present. This decreases the body’s ability to defend itself against antigens.
Oral corticosteroids are often prescribed for treating conditions like lupus, defined by an overactive immune system. This is because cortisol has such a profound impact on reducing immunity.
Even in these extreme cases, doctors often only prescribe corticosteroids for short courses because long-term usage is associated with a number of substantial adverse effects, including decreased bone density, increased blood sugar levels, elevated blood pressure, and increased body weight.
Trauma and Stress Influence the Brain
Trauma and chronic stress can affect the brain, which is similar to Alzheimer’s disease. They have a deleterious effect on a critical component in the brain called the hippocampus, which results in problems with memory and orientation or sense of direction.
These brain modifications may have evolved to defend against recollecting stressful and traumatic events, such as being attacked by some predator. However, short-term memory loss is a hindrance in today’s brain-intensive lifestyle and can be caused by a variety of factors.
We all know how frustrating it can be when we forget where we put the keys, the names of people we’ve just met, or something else that happened recently.
Brings Down the Energy Levels
Your body can become worn down by chronic stress. Your adrenal glands function similarly to battery packs, as they are responsible for the on-demand production of molecules that produce energy, such as adrenaline, which is an essential component of the body’s stress response. Unfortunately, many people squander these limited energy reserves by continuously demanding things of themselves in their personal and professional lives. The end outcome is exhaustion.
Stress Causes you to Age More Quickly
The stress of a chronic kind might hasten ageing beyond what would be considered normal. One piece of research suggests that prolonged stress may hasten the ageing process in otherwise healthy people. On the bright side, the same research suggests that managing one’s emotions and exercising self-control in the face of unhealthy behaviours may be helpful.
Help for chronic Stress and Trauma
Just a few of the many ways that stress and trauma can affect vital systems in the body have been described here. It is also harmful to your mental health, increasing the likelihood that you may suffer from conditions such as anxiety and depression and problems like obsessive-compulsive disorder and disordered eating.
We are here to assist you in implementing one of the many tried-and-true methods for stress management. Talk to our trained expert if you feel like stress is getting the better of you.
The team at TREUK® can assist you in better comprehending yourself and the stressors in your life, in addition to assisting you in the formation of coping mechanisms and the production of a happier and less stressful life.