Have you ever wondered how years of stress may be affecting your health—even when you think you're handling it well?
Between demanding careers, family responsibilities, financial pressures, and the everyday challenges of life, stress has become something many of us simply learn to live with. We push through the exhaustion, ignore the headaches, lose sleep, and tell ourselves, "It's just part of life."
But what if the stress you've learned to live with is quietly taking a toll on your health? Here's what we often overlook - just because we've learned to live with stress doesn't mean our bodies have learned to thrive under it.
Over time, chronic stress can weaken our body's defenses, increase inflammation and damage our cells resulting in faster biological aging a higher predisposition to disease and poor outcomes.
The good news? Understanding how chronic stress affects your body is the first step toward protecting your health.
Let's explore what's happening beneath the surface, why chronic stress matters for our health and longevity, and how small, intentional changes can help us move from simply surviving to truly thriving.
Chronic Stress
Did you know that chronic stress is a major cause in about 75% - 90% of chronic diseases and contributes to 50% of all illnesses? In the 1920s, researchers started identifying how stress is triggered in the body and how it impacts health; terms like “stress” (at the time it was a theory – stress theory), “fight-or flight”, and “diseases of adaptation” started to get coined as they gained more insight.
Today, it’s well known that chronic stress devastates our immune system and paves the way for serious diseases down the road. It’s also well known that black people in the US (and I believe around the world) carry higher levels of chronic stress throughout their lifetime, which is a contributor to our high rates of poor health outcome as a people. For example, a 2023 study found that black adults had poorer cardiovascular health than White adults with 11% of their chronic stress burden coming from neighborhood environment, neighborhood safety, perceived stress, and another 11% from stress dealing with discrimination.
Definition and Types of Stress
Stress is any influence, internal or external, that causes or leads to malfunction in the body; chronic stress is prolonged stress over time. There are 3 main types of stress, all of which can all lead to imbalance (in the body) and health issues when chronic:
1. Psychological/emotional/spiritual stress (e.g., perceived stress like fear, worry, excitement, anxiety, relationship issues, existential angst, lack of purpose, negative perceptions, a bad attitude, etc.).
2. Physical/biomechanical stress (e.g., fractures, muscle injuries or weakness, nerve compression, repetitive or positional injury, intense or prolonged exercise, poor posture, accidents, over-exercise, extreme temperatures, exposure, etc.).
3. Chemical/biochemical/functional stress (e.g., inflammatory foods and additives, pesticides, herbicides, GMOs, alcohol, caffeine, blood sugar imbalances, prescription and recreational drugs, chemicals, metals, radiation, EMFs, antibiotics, over-the-counter medications, exogenous hormones, parasites, bacteria, fungi, viruses, sleep deprivation, lack of exercise, allergies, etc.).
How Stress Occurs in the Body
Our bodies have been created to handle short-term (acute) stress and bounce back. This resilience is a built-in, natural response to restore homeostasis (biochemical balance in the body to maintain health) because the body will always work to restore/heal itself. At a very high level, our stress response is controlled by the HPA (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal) axis which is our central stress response system located in the lower center of our brain. When we experience short-term stress our adrenal gland releases cortisol and other hormones to help us manage the acute stress ("fight-or-flight" reaction). In this state, changes such as increased heart, relaxed airways for greater respiration, redirected blood flow to the muscles including the heart, slowed digestion, inhibited insulin release, increased blood sugar are a few of the many actions that take place in our body.
When we are under prolonged (chronic) stress our hypothalamus gland is activated and integrated signals from our nervous system and other regions of the brain kick in. Hormones called corticosteroids (including cortisol and aldosterone) are released to help our body sustain a response to the chronic stress; however, long term high cortisol levels throw our HPA-Axis out of balance (dysregulates it) and eventually HPA-Axis dysfunction occurs. In HPA-Axis dysfunction, our bodies are no longer able to adapt to the chronic stress, and it either overreacts or underreacts to stress. The dysregulated cortisol levels start to impact our energy, sleep, energy, hormones, digestion, heart, and cause low-grade inflammation leading to other complicated health issues. In short, cortisol is a life saver temporarily, but continuous long term over production of it will start to break down our body.
Other Factors Contributing to Health
I mentioned earlier that it contributes to 50% of all illnesses; so, what contributes to the other 50%? Lifestyle is a major contributor to health outcomes particularly when it comes to metabolic diseases (e.g., obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease). Other factors that contribute to health also include, genetics, nutrition, spirituality, social support, systematic racism in medicine, and social determinants of health (e.g., income, education, environment, etc.).
Conclusion
Chronic stress is a key factor leading to wellness and health issues such as early onset of perimenopause, weight gain, poor gut health, autoimmune disease, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, chronic fatigue, bone degeneration, aging, metal health, and more. Schedule a discovery call to learn more about our services and how we can partner with you to resolve the impact of chronic stress on your health and wellness.
References:
1. https://doi.org/10.1177/18344909241289222
