What Is Stress And Why Does It Matter?

STRESS MINI SERIES: PART 1 OF 4

Introduction:

So…stress. Yep. A pretty big topic that we are going to try and tackle right off the bat. There is so much to cover in relation to stress that In this article we will go over the very basics, the most important concepts to grasp, and then in further articles we will come back to stress and dig a bit beeper into the various elements of it.

I am sure you will all have a picture in your mind about what stress is, and I’d bet that more often than not stress will have a negative association, something that impacts us mentally, it is something to avoid, or a similar thought. Let’s start off by saying that not all stress is bad. Stress is our body’s reaction to a challenge or pressure applied to it and can be mental or physical. Therefore stress is also what helps our bodies adapt so that we are better prepared if that same challenge ever returns. We just need to make sure we are maximising the adaptations that we want and are limiting the ones we don’t.

Two Types Of Stress:

Our first type of stress is short term stress, otherwise known as ‘acute’. This is our hero of the stress world, the good kind - our Batman or Wonder Woman (or Simba, for the Disney lovers!). Hero may be a bit strong here, as acute stress doesn’t always come from something we want to happen (e.g. stuck in traffic), but we’d just usually say there aren’t any long term negative impacts. This type of stress impacts our body but the repercussions don’t hang around too long, which allows our body to learn and adapt from it to come back stronger and more resilient. A more relevant example for us would be exercise. If you do a workout, you are stressing your body and forcing it do deal with that stress and adapt. This is how you can get better over time through your workouts - running faster, getting stronger, whatever the goal is. Therefore acute stress can be a good thing too (so long as we recover properly, but that’s definitely one for another day!).

The second type of stress is long term stress, otherwise known as ‘chronic’ stress. This is pretty categorically the bad kind - our Joker or Scar (who I still believe is the best villain ever created, ever). This is the more stereotypical picture of stress most people have, and this usually doesn’t come from workouts but more from pretty much every other thing going on in your life. Work is usually the biggest, but other common life stressors are things like relationships (and are more stressful for us when they aren’t going well), family, finances, your environment and emotions. The list goes on, but all these impact you on a much more long term timescale. Oh, and it’s not one or the other, they can all impact you at once, having a compounding effect on your body. It’s safe to say then that these chronic stressors need to be managed to make sure they don’t become too much for us - as that is when it can have knock on effects for our physical and mental health. It isn’t realistic to aim to remove them all in today’s world - you can’t just up and leave your job tomorrow even if you really want to! In severe cases, those level of discussions may be needed, but in others just being able to be aware of when your stress is creeping up, and having ways to deal with it to help you can make the world of difference to how you feel.

The Autonomic Nervous System:

Now we know the two types of stress, let’s quickly touch on how our body tries to deal with this - enter our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). The clue is in the name here, as a lot of the functions that this controls in our body are automatic so we don’t have to think about doing them consciously. For example, breathing, digesting food, blood pressure and our metabolism. It is linked to a vast amount of our body starting from our brain and linking through many of our vital organs. There are two sides to the ANS which are:

“That feeling you get before speaking in public is from the sympathetic nervous system”

1. The Parasympathetic Side

This is known as our ‘rest and digest’ state, and is when the body is more relaxed. Here’s a quick view of some key things that the parasympathetic nervous system controls, and you’ll quickly see how important it is to spend the majority of our time here: lowers heart rate, lowers breathing rate, aids in digestion and excretion, the list goes on. Put simply, if we aren’t intentionally stressing ourselves (like a workout), we want to spend as much time in this state as possible. It’s also key for weight loss if you are trying to diet (which again is another stressor!).

2. The Sympathetic Side

This is our ‘fight or flight’ state and the classic example is a caveman running from a tiger. More applicable now might be that feeling you get before public speaking, if you are in a heated argument or confrontation, those kind of things. However you’ll notice that these examples are again short term stressors. The body is only designed to be in this state for short amounts of time to react to these stressors. The issue is that the more chronic stress we put ourselves under the more time we spend in this sympathetic state, where we don’t want to be especially when at rest, because while our ‘fight or flight’ state is higher, our body downplays the importance of functions that happen in the ‘rest and digest’ state. This is what causes us issues over time like struggling to sleep, constipation, high blood pressure and heart rate, difficulty to lose weight - again the list goes on.

Hopefully with that quick overview, you can see how we want to shift the balance to make sure we are spending the majority of our time in our ‘rest and digest’ state, as that is where all the good stuff happens!

Your Stress Is A Cup:

“The more stress your body is under the more your cup fills up”

The last thing I want leave you with for this article is a quick visual that I believe is a great way to help you think about stress and managing it. I want to you to think about your stress as a cup, and all of the life stressors that you have get poured into the cup. Family, jobs, environment, exercise - they all go in and start to fill the cup up. This mix (or cocktail if we want to sound fancy) will look different for every person, but everyone will have their own cup and their own mix. Some ingredients in the cocktail are bigger than others, and some are easier to reduce or manage than others. But you’ve got to make sure your cup doesn’t overflow. This is key to making sure that you have both good physical health and good mental health.

In coming posts we will cover how to measure your stress, how to manage your stress, and what your stress levels mean for your training and exercise.

Any questions please reach out to me! If you know anyone else you think would benefit from giving this a read, please send it on to them too.

Stay Healthy,

Ben