Excess stress hormones wear on the body, nipping away at the DNA that keeps cells dividing and long-lived, constricting the blood vessels and triggering blood pressure to rise. Even the body immune system is influenced, as leukocyte that typically patrol for bacteria and viruses aren't produced at normal, disease-fighting levels. It's for these factors that anxiety and stress have actually been connecteded to cardiac arrest, strokes, immune conditions, weight problems, 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 effective stimulants, triggering the senses to function at their sharpest. Psychologists have shown a relationship between stress and efficiency. As the tension and worry that accompany a performance increase so does the quality of that performance, as much as a particular point. The secret isn't not to feel anxious; it's to find out ways to manage that experience. Anxiety itself is neither helpful nor upsetting; it is our response to our anxiety that is useful or hurtful.
So it would seem, just like the majority of things, that handling our stress and stressful responses ends up being a bit of a balancing act. For all the suffering anxiety causes, the fact 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 view as unsafe or threatening. The legendary saber-toothed tiger springs at the primitive human, and the human responds with a biological red alert, bypassing the fairly time-consuming thinking centers in the brain in favor of a shortcut directly to the deeper-seated hypothalamus. This awakens the nervous system to launch hormones that immediately accelerated heart rate and respiration, feeding new blood and oxygen to the muscles, which require the boost to carry the human as rapidly and as far from the risk as possible.
The problem with all this is that our primitive biological systems have not kept up with the modern-day world and aren't awfully good at distinguishing between a jungle full of killer cats and a meeting room full of nothing but other people. If we can't make the difference, terror can rapidly eat us in safe situations. There are constant, subtle concerns and pressures that grind at us every day, occasionally leaving us staring at the ceiling deep into the night. This can lead to feelings of sheer overload.
The Concern is supposed to be Step 1 of problem resolving, however it can be problem-generating instead. If it starts too long, it in fact overrides your capability to problem-solve. When we are anxious, our adrenal gland releases over 30 hormones into our blood stream, all developed to obtain the body's respiratory and cardiac systems fired up. Principal among these chemicals is cortisol, typically called the stress hormone, which does a lot of the cellular damage when it hangs around in the body too long.
If you figure out that your responses to the daily stressors present in your life have become bothersome, fortunately, therapy has actually shown to be a really effective way to address this concern. Therapy can increase our coping techniques as well as improve the way you feel about those things that are unforeseeable and out of our control. If you perceive you can cope, you will not feel as stressed.
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