Excess stress hormones wear on the body, nipping away at the DNA that keeps cells dividing and long-lived, constricting the capillary and causing blood pressure to rise. Even the immune system is impacted, as leukocyte that typically patrol for bacteria and viruses aren't produced at normal, disease-fighting levels. It's for these reasons that anxiety and stress have actually been linked to heart attacks, strokes, immune disorders, excessive weight, infertility and more.
That's not to say all anxiety is all bad. In just the correct amounts, the hormones that drive anxiety can be powerful stimulants, causing the senses to function at their sharpest. Psychologists have shown a relationship between stress and performance. As the tension and worry that accompany a performance increase so does the quality of that efficiency, up to a specific point. The key isn't really not to feel nervous; it's to discover ways to manage that experience. Anxiety itself is neither practical nor painful; it is our response to our anxiety that is valuable or painful.
So it would seem, similar to the majority of things, that handling our stress and difficult responses ends up being a little bit of a balancing act. For all the suffering anxiety triggers, the reality is, the human race would not be better off without it-- and we might not be right here at all. At its core, anxiety is a reaction, an arousal to a stimulus that we perceive as hazardous or threatening. The legendary saber-toothed tiger springs at the primitive human, and the human reacts with a biological red alert, bypassing the relatively time-consuming thinking centers in the brain in favor of a faster way directly to the deeper-seated hypothalamus. This awakens the nerves to launch hormones that instantly accelerated heart rate and respiration, feeding fresh blood and oxygen to the muscles, which need the boost to bring the human as swiftly and as far from the danger as possible.
The problem with all this is that our primitive biological systems have not quite kept up with the contemporary world and aren't horribly good at distinguishing between a jungle full of killer felines and a meeting room full of nothing but other people. If we cannot make the distinction, terror can rapidly consume us in safe circumstances. There are constant, subtle concerns and pressures that grind at us every day, in some cases leaving us looking at the ceiling deep into the night. This can cause feelings of sheer overload.
The Concern is supposed to be Step 1 of problem solving, but it can be problem-generating instead. If it gets going too long, it really overrides your ability to problem-solve. When we are anxious, our adrenal gland releases over 30 hormones into our blood stream, all developed to get the body's respiratory and cardiac systems fired up. Principal among these chemicals is cortisol, typically called the stress hormone, which does the majority of the cellular damage when it spends time in the body too long.
If you identify that your responses to the everyday stressors present in your life have become problematic, fortunately, therapy has actually shown to be a very reliable way to address this problem. Therapy can enhance our coping strategies along with enhance the way you feel about those things that are unforeseeable and out of our control. If you perceive you can cope, you will certainly not feel as stressed.
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