Transforming Stress..
The word Stress has now become a household name. We even hear kids using it! We hear that word all the time and sometimes most people don’t really understand what stress is.
So let’s start with learning a little bit about what stress really is…
Stress is a demand on our body. It’s a demand that’s a lot more than what we can handle at the time. And, there are different types of stress.
Stress can be positive like the stress of running or lifting weights that may be just a little too heavy for us. However, our body responds to this type of stress by building muscle. In fact, as a result of this kind of stress, we become stronger.
Now, there’s the bad stress like when our cat just got run over by a car or when we just stepped on a scorpion. Perhaps we have a deadline to meet and we don’t think we’re going to make it. Those stressors tend to be hard on our body because they don’t necessarily trigger a positive outcome.
Our body is designed to handle stress. When stressed, there’s a whole set of mechanisms that happen called the “fight flight mechanism.” And it’s basically controlled by two little glands in our body called the Adrenal glands and they sit right on top of the kidneys.
Now, our stress response is actually designed for situations such as – ‘I’m out in the woods looking for food and there’s a tiger chasing me, what do I do?’ Well, at this point, we have two choices in the language of our stress response system. One is to stay and fight. The other is to run away. Of course, depending on our size, stature and speed, we need to make a decision as to whether we FIGHT or run (FLIGHT).
In the situation with a tiger, our response would be to try to run and hide.
At this point, what simultaneously happens in our bodies is it triggers a whole set of physiological responses.
Our heart starts to beat faster. Why does our heart start to beat faster? If you take that hypothetical situation, where it’s a tiger actually chasing you, the heart needs to beat faster in order to pump more blood out to the legs and the hands, so that we can run away and we can get away faster or we can throw things at it or we can climb a tree.
So, that’s what that ‘fight-flight’ is all about and that’s what the speeding up of the heart rate is.
In our everyday lives, of course, that speeding up of the heart rate doesn’t do us much good when the stress that we’re dealing with is sitting in traffic and the car in front of us just cut us off. The speeding up of our heart is not going to help us get away from that stress or to stand up and fight that stress. It just creates a response in our body that can be uncomfortable. Other reactions we experience are sweating and raised blood pressure.
