Identifying stress

Transcript

Welcome to part two of your wellbeing course.

In this section we’re going to look at the stress impact and how this effects our physical bodies. What happens to our physical bodies when the stress response is taking place. We’re also going to look at the effects that stress has on our general health and our wellbeing. We’re also going to look at how we can identify stress points in our lives. First we’re going to look at what is stress.

Stress is a reaction to a perceived or real threat. It’s primarily a physical response. Our body thinks it’s under attack. The body switches to fight, flight, freeze or flop mode. A stress response is your body’s way of responding to any type of demand. It can be caused by both good and bad experiences. When we feel stressed our body reacts by releasing chemicals into the blood. Stress can be in our everyday lives. Stress can diminish our overall health and wellbeing. Stress can create a multitude of difficulties for us in our physical, mental and emotional lives. In our physical, to do with their physical, mental and emotional states.

What is stress, what’s the physical response that we receive when stress and the stress response kicks in. Stress stimulates the body to produce hormones. We get a surge of adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol pumping through our bodies. Our heart pounds faster, our muscles tighten. The Blood starts to flow around our body more quickly. Our blood pressure rises, our breath quickens and our senses become sharper. We breathe faster to quickly distribute oxygen-rich blood to our bodies. Our blood vessels constrict and start to distribute even more oxygen-rich blood to our bodies to support us to take action. This then also raises our blood pressure. This also lowers our immune system function. For our immune system to be functioning at maximum, functioning at 100% our stress response needs to be lowered. The fight, flight. freeze or flop response that kicks in our stress response, suppresses our immune system. For our immune systems to be boosted up, the stress response needs to be down.

What happens when we have these overactive stress hormones raging around our bodies. Stress hormones are for emergencies. They’re absolutely fine, they’re part of evolvement of the human race. We wouldn’t be where we are if we didn’t have the stress response in place. The stress response has supported us to evolve. It has supported us and still does, to get out of the way if there’s a lion chasing us, to get out of the way if there’s a tiger chasing us, to allow us to step back out of the road if a car beeps a horn to say that we’ve just stepped into the road and we’re now in danger. It kicks us into that stress response to help us to get out of the way. It’s necessary. Like I said it is for emergencies, our stress response is for emergencies.

We now live at a pace where we activate our stress response all the time, missing deadlines missing a bus, missing a train, missing a plane, not being able to get on the internet, not been able to connect to Wi-Fi. And you know, friends and family events can stress some people out. Maybe having to speak in public can be really difficult for some people.

Anything that kicks that fear response in, that anxiety type of response in, that stress response in really is what’s going to set these hormones off. And our stress response can get us as fired up as a sprinter waiting to take off when the starting gun, when the starting gun goes off. But we don’t get the release of the race the way a sprinter might when they’re all fired up to go.

If we just have this low-grade stress that’s constantly there in the background, all these hormones are still spinning, the wheels of those hormones are still spinning in the background. And this is where the problem can occur for us. Our bodies and mind don’t get enough downtime, don’t get enough rest time, don’t get enough breaks in between each stress filled moment. And with no release, these stress hormones just keep on working. And that’s where our difficulty lies.

The impact of stress, how does stress impact us? Stress can impact us in many ways. Elevated cortisol levels. Elevated cortisol levels interfere with our learning. Elevated cortisol levels interfere with memory. Elevated cortisol levels contribute to lowered immune function and bone density issues. Elevated cortisol levels can increase chronic illness, can increase chronic heart disease, can increase our blood pressure and can contribute to increased cholesterol. Stress can kill brain cells and can even reduce the size of the brain, if it’s prolonged stress over a long period of time.

Chronic stress has a shrinking effect on the prefrontal cortex in the brain. This is the area of the brain responsible for memory and learning. Stress symptoms can affect our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings and can even affect our behaviour. Being able to recognize your common stress symptoms can give you a head start on trying to alleviate stress in your life on a daily basis. Stress if left unchecked can contribute to many daily difficulties in our lives, such as, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes to name just a few.

Do we need stress? can stress be good for you? And the answer to that is yes. Yes it can. We do need stress. We’ve mentioned already, you know, it’s getting out of the way of danger, getting out of the way of something that’s chasing us, getting out of the way of the car that we’ve just stepped out into the path of. Stress is our body’s way of telling us what we need to do.

Modern demands can give us a buzz from a short burst of hormones. It can help us to perform more effectively, it can improve our memory, it can stimulate us. It’s a vital warning system that produces the fight-or-flight response in us.

However, too much stress strains our heart it robs us of mental clarity and it increases our risk of chronic disease. This is where our difficulty is. Chronic stress equals chronic illness. If the body is out of balance from a stress response and it’s a chronic long-term ongoing stress response, then the body can’t stay in balance because of this. Because these hormones are raging throughout the body. Illness is going to come through in the body in some shape or form because the body is so out of balance. Illness is only there because the body is out of balance.

Looking at the effects of stress on our health. We’re going to look at acute or short-term stress versus longer term or chronic stress. With acute stress we may get headaches, fatigue. We may have difficulty sleeping, maybe an upset stomach, irritability. It could be something that happens us in our day or in our week, where it was just short term stress. You know something annoyed us, something angered us, something caused difficulty for us, or tension for us in some shape or form. And this has caused short-term stress for us. We’re going to be able to let this go. It may last a few hours, it may last an hour, it may last a day it may last a couple of days, but we’re going to be able to let it go. And we’re going to allow our system to calm down again. Our stress response to calm down again.

The difficulty lies then when we move over to the chronic stress or the ongoing stress symptoms. Things that can result from having chronic stress then are things like depression, abnormal heartbeat, high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, heart disease, possibly even heart attack.  Having an upset stomach, constipation, diarrhoea, weight gain or weight loss. Flare-ups, we all have people in our lives, or even for ourselves where we know that there’s a certain thing that flares up in our health system and when we’re asked, or we take a moment to reflect, to say you know, can I identify what this is related to? Can I identify a pattern?  We may say, or we may hear other people say, actually when I’m stressed about X Y or Z or when I have been stressed about X Y this is when this happens. Our body is  giving us a warning signal. It’s giving us the red flag to correct this. Whatever is causing the stress we need that to be removed, lessened or changed so that we can get the stress response down in our body.

Because again the stress response needs to be there. But we don’t need to have it there on a long-term basis. It’s for emergencies. If we’re kicking that emergency response in on a longer-term basis. It is going to bring our body out of balance too much, that our body needs to start giving us signals. And these signals then come through as pain, discomfort, tension or flare-ups or different illnesses that can happen within the body as well.

Where does stress come from? Stress comes from external factors and comes from internal factors. External factors may be financial difficulties, health difficulties, relationship difficulties, career difficulties. There could be stress within our careers to do it is this the right job for me? Feeling happy in our job, having good management within our jobs as well. Making sure that we can manage our finances.

There may be difficulty with job loss, with being unable to secure work. There could be lots of different difficulties to do with relationships as well, to do with living arrangements, to do with the home that we live in. If we have a roof over our head. There can be lots of difficulties for people on a wide range of things that are to do with external factors that cause stress in our lives. Bereavement, divorce, separation, moving home, having a chronic illness, emotional challenges, depression, anxiety, holding on to anger, holding on to rage, holding lots of fear, holding lots of guilt, having low self-esteem.

Taking care of other family members, whether they’re ill or elderly. Family members having experienced a traumatic event or a very stressful or shocking event or witnessing something shocking or traumatic as well. In life these are all things that can cause stress to us from an external perspective. Internal things that can cause us stress – fear and uncertainty, anxiety, difficulty with change, holding negative emotions and thoughts from traumatic events that may have happened in our lives or traumatic events that may have happened to others. Or are happening to others in their lives.

Our attitudes and perceptions towards our self and towards others. A feeling of overwhelm. Having unrealistic expectations on ourselves and on others. All of these things can cause intrinsic stress or can be intrinsic factors that bring stress to our lives as well.

Stress helps our body to prepare to face danger. Stress in everyday terms is a feeling of being overloaded, of struggling to cope with demands or feeling  overwhelmed. Stress symptoms can be both physical and psychological for us. Short-term stress can be helpful, but, long-term stress can be linked to various different health conditions. We can prepare for stress and manage stress by learning some various different tools and techniques to help us and support us.

Just to take a moment to go to part two of your workbook. We’re going to look at a stress related exercise. We’re going to look at the stress response and identifying stress points in our lives. You have a wheel in front of you in this exercise and really what you want to do is to label the eight segments that are within that wheel if at all possible. These eight segments are areas of your life, just main areas of your life. Not areas where you feel stressed necessarily just eight main areas of your life. And there’s an example in the workbook there that shows you somebody who has completed this exercise and the 8 areas that they chose.

You can pick those areas as well or if you want to pick other areas that are relevant to you. You may feel that there’s crossover in the example there. That some of those areas are relevant, or all of them are relevant to you. If you can’t think of eight at the moment and you just think of four or five, just do four or five for now. That’s absolutely fine. If you can think of more than eight, just to put a number to the side and then you can look at those later on as well. We’re just going to focus on eight for this exercise for the moment.

What we want to do first of all, is to look at satisfaction with each of the eight areas in your lives. Where zero is the centre of the wheel and ten is the outside of the wheel, it’s just really looking to see where you can put a straight line in each segment to notify whether you’re from zero to ten. Zero is the centre and ten is the outside area. Zero is low satisfaction. Ten is high satisfaction in each of those areas.

You’re going to do two exercises on this one wheel in your exercise book. If you want to just take a moment to pause your video and just to write down the eight areas, the eight segments. And then where you feel satisfied in each of those areas from zero to ten. Zero is low satisfaction in one particular area. Ten is high satisfaction.

For example with the person in the example that you have on your workbook. If you look at the career segments there, this person is at about a five and career. If you look at health then in the segment in the example in your workbook, health then is at about a three for this person. They feel satisfied at about a three out of ten in the area of health. And you can just use that as an example as you work around your own wheel. Just to pause the video and just record where you feel satisfied in each area.

Ok guys, so the next section then we’re going to look at stress within each of these areas. So for each of the eight segments that you have, it’s just to draw a dotted line where you feel you have stress in a particular segment. And there may be segments where you feel you have no stress at all and that’s absolutely fine. You just don’t record any answer there. The next part of the instructions then are to record a dotted line where you feel stress in each part. Zero is no stress at all and ten is highly stressed. Some people may even feel they’re over 10. It’s just to put a dotted line in the same segment where you feel there’s stress for you in that particular area. Just to look at the example then on the page that you have there. For the example there in the area of health – the person who completed this already has about a five, they have a dotted line around about a five in the area of health. And even to just look at the relationship and romance section for this person. They have around about a 5 which is satisfaction. A 5 on the solid line in this area of romance of relationships. But they’ve no dotted line so they don’t feel any stress in this area either. Even though they only have 5, number 5 out of 10 satisfaction, they don’t feel like they have stress in this area. It’s just to pause the video then and to work your way around the segments, to see where your dotted lines are in each of the areas if you have stress in each of the areas.

In part 2 then guys we looked at some core aspects that were related to stress. We looked at the physical impacts of stress on our bodies. We looked at the effects of stress on our health and our well-being. And then we also looked at our exercise to identify our stress points. And don’t forget to go to your workbook to complete your quiz that’s at the end of part two for this section as well.