Understanding the two types of stress and how our body and brain respond to them is a major step toward learning how to manage stress in your life. These stress articles are presented to help you live a richer, fuller life.
Acute Stress
Acute stress is good stress. This is the body's normal response to a perceived threat. That perceived threat can be physical, emotional or psychological and it can be real or imagined. It is your perception, what you think, that triggers what your body and mind do next.
Your body has an autonomic nervous system that is activated during times of acute stress. This is what causes the increased levels of adrenaline and cortisol and other hormones that we discussed in the article, Stress Causes Physiological Changes. You will actually experience higher blood pressure as your body redirects blood flow from your extremities to the big muscles in preparation for fight or flight..
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the part of the nervous system in charge of regulating involuntary vital functions such as your heart, digestive system and glands. In other words, it senses a need and automatically responds to it. Your ANS has two subsystems.
The sympathetic nervous system is the one that prepares the body for fight or flight. The parasympathetic nervous system is the other side. It is your relaxation response. Think of these two subsystems as a light switch. The sympathetic system speeds the heart rate, constricts the blood vessels, decreases digestive activity, raises blood pressure and says, "Bring it on." The parasympathetic system says, "Turn it off." It slows the heart rate and returns those other body functions to normal.
The parasympathetic system, when activated, relaxes your muscles. Think about that tense neck and shoulders you felt when stressed. Now we’re beginning to see the problem more clearly. For most of us, "bring it on" happens far more often than "turn it off."
Chronic Stress
Chronic stress is defined as a state of ongoing physiological arousal due to a perceived threat. That threat is running through your nervous system flipping every light switch it can find and not turning any of them off. Those two subsystems are designed to work in harmony. Remember that famous phrase from the movie Karate Kid? "Wax on, wax off." Well, imagine waxing your car using just one side of the equation: wax on, wax on, wax on, wax on. What would your car look like if you continued adding wax and never removed it?
That is the way chronic stress works. The two subsystems are not working in harmony. The fight or flight response is being triggered time after time after time but the relaxation response is not being activated. The perceived threat is not going away.
Once upon a time we looked at certain jobs as high pressure jobs such as those in the sales and medical professions. Today – what job is not high pressure? Is your company planning layoffs? Could your company benefits be decreased? Will your salary keep up with rising costs? Each of these questions poses a perceived threat simply because you may or may not know the answer to any of them.
The workplace, unfortunately, is not the only source of stress. If all family relationships were in perfect harmony there would be no divorce. Why is there such a thing as road rage? Well, things on the highway are not in perfect harmony either, are they? What about your love life? What love life, you say. Exactly! Loneliness is a horrible threat. And we sometimes feel alone in a crowded room. Do you have a loved one subject to military service? Do you have a loved one on the wrong side of the legal system?
Piling on generates an unnecessary roughness penalty in football. Think of chronic stress as piling on. In this case, however, the referee, our autonomic response system, falls into the pile under the weight of the ugly, nasty, very bad chronic stress.
So, it's up to us to deal with it. The next article in this series is Dealing with Stress.
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