Covenant Health For Life

Not All Stress Is Good for You
An Austro-Hungarian medical practitioner by the name of Hans Selye uncovered a pattern of stress in the human body.  He was not the first to discover stress.  That privilege belongs to Walter Cannon.  But Selye worked out that stress has three stages: alarm, resistance, then exhaustion.  He gave these stages a descriptive name: general adaption syndrome (G.A.S.).  But the problem did not end there.  There was a second component to the physiology of stress, and that is the development of a pathological state from ongoing stress –  stress without relief.

Here you can see the real culprit in the diabetes saga: unrelieved stress.

This may seem strange.  Stress is your “emergency” call, but if that cry for help is activated on an ongoing basis and does not get released, it can cause damage and create an environment where significant “dis-ease” can grab hold.

Even worse, there is evidence to suggest that constant high levels of stress have a negative impact on your ability to learn and your ability to remember things.

Did I hear someone blurt, “What did you say?”

Understanding G.A.S.

The initial stage of fight-or-flight is your body going on full alert.  Your heart speeds up, blood pressure rises, and your breathing rate increases.  Your digestion shuts down so that the energy needed for that can be directed elsewhere.  After all, at this time your body does not need to digest anything.  It is getting ready to handle something perceived to be unfriendly.  The pupils of your eyes dilate so that the lens relaxes a little more, allowing more light in so you can see better.
Meanwhile, your liver begins to let go of its store of glucose, releasing it into the blood stream.  Your body is demanding sugar for energy to be delivered to the muscles that need them should you choose to fight or run.  Two peanut-sized glands located just above the kidneys release both adrenaline and cortisol into your body to provide a boost to the blood sugar.  Adrenaline and cortisol are the hormones released to help the body manage stress.  They are not the only ones, but these are certainly important ones in the diabetes story.

These two hormones give your elevated heart rate and blood pressure  what they need to do their job: the ability to deliver nutrients and oxygen to the muscles that need them to handle the emergency.

In this stressful environment your mental and sensory powers can improve so you make better judgments.  Good musicians, for example, can use their adrenaline rush to enhance their performances because their judgment, and therefore control of the instrument, is enhanced.

But here’s a fascinating point to remember.  You do not need an actual event to stimulate the stress response.  Just thinking about the possibility of an event can get the body charged up.

Sapolsky has a great description of what is going on.

You sit in your chair not moving a muscle, and simply think a thought, a thought having to do with feeling angry or sad or euphoric or lustful, and suddenly your pancreas secretes some hormone.  Your pancreas?  How did you manage to do that with your pancreas?  You don’t even know where your pancreas is.  Your liver is making an enzyme that wasn’t there before, your spleen is text-messaging something to your thymus gland, blood- flow in little capillaries in your ankles has just changed.  All from thinking a thought. (1994: 20)

How does all of this happen?

The HPA Axis

Think of this remarkable “machine” – you!  When danger appears, your brain’s hypothalamus perceives an environmental threat and it engages the command officers and artillery and puts them on full alert.

A signal is sent to the pituitary gland, once described as the “Master Gland.”  The pituitary has the task of organizing the fifty trillion cells in your body to deal with an impending threat.  It gets your body’s organs in motion.

In turn, the pituitary gland sends a signal to the adrenal glands.  “Get coordinated,” is the message.  “Rally the troops, prepare the artillery.  We’re about to go into battle – or run –  whichever we think is the best course of action to address the current ‘enemy.’”  The adrenal glands release both adrenaline and cortisol into the body in readiness for action.

It is now understandable why the adrenal glands are located near the liver and the pancreas. The liver holds a store of vitamins and minerals that can be released into the body as it is needed.  Somewhere in your body, food is stored in the form of amino acids, which are not a good source of energy.  Your liver, at the right time, will convert the amino acids into glucose, a process called gluconeogenesis.

Adrenaline

The hormone adrenaline, also known as epinephrine, makes the heart race faster, increases the blood pressure, helps expand the blood vessels, and increases levels of glucose in the blood.  Did you get that?  Increased levels of glucose in the blood.  Repeat that 500 times if necessary.  Adrenaline increases blood glucose levels.  But what is causing the increased adrenaline?  Not the glucose itself.  Something else is going on here.

Cortisol
On the other hand, cortisol, one of the glucocorticoids, helps to regulate the blood sugar.  Your body naturally has higher levels of cortisol in the morning as you begin to come out of a night’s sleep.  Levels at night will be lower as your body starts to shut down for its night’s rest.  In a state of stress, cortisol production is increased to get the bodily functions moving.  But there is more.  There’s always more, and failing to understand that can be a huge part of the problem.

Where Is Fat in All This?

To complete the picture of stress, it is important to know what the body does with its increased glucose levels under stress.  When the fight-or-flight response takes hold, the increased glucose levels may get used up in either fight-or-flight.

But what happens if the stress situation is caused while sitting in your car on the freeway when there is a traffic jam making you late for an important appointment?  At that time, the body is stressed, but it neither fights nor flees.  It is just immobile in the car.

It’s the same in the office, and a range of other stressful situations.  If you’re sitting silently, angry, depressed and resentful, the fat that is already there and the new glucose secreted into the body, is not used up.

So the glucose gets stored in the form of fat, especially in the cells around the abdomen, which absorb fat so readily.  It is stored, easily available for the next emergency.  But if the next emergency does not use up the glucose created, it adds to the store, if it can.  The fatty cells have limits.  You can fill them up.  But then they  send out signals to other cells to take over the fat absorption.

Ouch!

These fat cells, however, create a major problem for the next part of the fight-or-flight response.

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