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My Summer
WELLNESS
WOMEN AND STRESS By Dr Arien van der Merwe
S
tress can be positive or negative. When stress motivates you and sparks personal achievement, it can work to your benefit by making you enthusiastic, creative and productive. But stress can easily spiral out of control and take a toll on your physical and emotional health and wellbeing. Stress is not an illness, but it can lead to specific medical symptoms, often serious enough to send women to the emergency room or their health care practitioner’s office. According to the American Psychological Association, 43% of adults suffer adverse health effects from stress, and 75 – 90 % of all visits to a doctor are stress related. Women are experiencing more stress at every stage of their lives than ever before. Juggling their professional life, education needs, family schedules, money issues, career advancement, and child- and elder-care concerns are only a few of the common stress triggers. Working mothers, regardless of whether they are married or single, face higher stress levels than men in the workplace as well as at home. Most, if not all illnesses and ailments have an underlying current of long-term stress at their source. While both men and women can suffer from stress and its related risk implications, women experience and react to stress differently than men do. Some health challenges related to stress affect women only: • Stress can disrupt your menstrual cycle – from severe cramps (dysmenorrhoea) and premenstrual syndrome, to infertility and a difficult menopause. • Stress can play a role in the onset of migraine headaches, making the experience even worse. • Women who sacrifice their own needs for others’ end up feeling resentful, stressed and done in. • Weight gain and difficulty in maintaining a healthy weight are common concerns in women over 35 years of age. Underlying
stress from deeply buried unconscious emotions plays an important role, as do increased cortisol levels, insulin resistance and metabolic rate. Overeating might be a way of trying to find nourishment for emotional needs through food, or may be due to an underlying need for protection and safety. • The increased stress metabolism leads to more free radical formation and oxidative stress, which accelerates the ageing process, as well as playing an important role in the development of physical illnesses and ailments. This is also the reason why long-term stress over many years will be visible as advanced ageing of the skin, with wrinkles at a younger age. • Stress can cause a variety of physical ailments, from headaches to symptoms that mimic a heart attack. In addition, stress can cause depression and anxiety, and might trigger diseases like osteoarthritis, heart disease, high blood pressure, eczema, asthma, metabolic syndrome, and even cancer.
as spastic colon (irritable bowel syndrome), peptic ulcers, indigestion, gastritis, leaky gut, constipation, candidiasis, even ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. The gut is often called the second brain. All disease processes can be linked to stress in this way.
Stress puts you into red alert flight-or-fight mode. The stress hormones (from the adrenal glands on top of the kidneys) adrenalin, noradrenalin and cortisol course through your bloodstream, leading to various physiological responses geared to survival when your life is in danger.
Stress can cause weight gain, especially around the abdomen, as the stress hormone, cortisol is a powerful appetite stimulant and fat manufacturer. This is good when faced with a famine or long periods of intense cold: eat and store as much as possible to survive the lean years and to form a protective layer against the cold! Only problem is, you’re not facing a famine or cold, you’re experiencing too much job, relationship, personal or family stress in your life. Chronically high levels of cortisol actually stimulate the fat cells inside the abdomen to fill with more fat, leading to the well-known apple-shaped figure associated with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and cancer. As you age, your expanding waistline can be life threatening.
The body copes well with short periods of intense stress balanced by periods of rest. The exhaustion sets in when stress becomes chronic. When you constantly feel stressed out, tense, anxious and burnt-out, the frequent trigger of the stress response puts a severe strain on your heart, artery linings, adrenal glands and all the systems of your body. If you have a family tendency for heart disease, stress might precipitate early cardiovascular disease. Women often have digestive problems. The stress response redirects blood from the digestive system to the muscles, leaving the bowel and stomach nutrient- and oxygen-deficient. If prone to a specific digestive system weakness, women with constant anxiety and stress will experience digestive problems such
Too much stress can also affect your immune system, weakening it and making you more susceptible to colds, coughs and infections. Stress activates the endocrine (hormonal) system which can lead to changes in the immune system, weakening the body’s defense against infection and diseases like cancer. Studies of women with breast cancer have shown significantly higher rates of cancer among women who have experienced traumatic life events (e.g. divorce or the loss of a loved one) several years before their disease was diagnosed. Stress management can support immune function and heart health, proving effective in the treatment of nearly all diseases and ailments.
Women might struggle to lose weight because the body experiences your deeply unconscious emotions of feeling unprotected as a reason to form more fat as protection against cold and hunger, which were huge threats to the survival of ancient human beings. Rather than blaming your body for doing what it’s programmed to do,
DECEMBER 2020
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Vir vriendelike diens! caring for you
be grateful and appreciate your body, and work on releasing the old, damaging emotional baggage that makes you feel, albeit unconsciously, that you need fat for protection. This can be a wonderful healing journey in which you learn how to release all the past injuries and hurts, living freely and lightly. Recent research has added another perspective to the fight-or-flight stress response that highlights how women react differently under stress than men do. By using the tend-and-befriend response, as coined by Dr Shelly Taylor, women (and female animals from all species) experiencing stress tend to nurture themselves and their young, and to form bonds with others, especially when experiencing long-term chronic stress. This behavior can be traced back to the need of female animals, including ourselves and our ancestors, to protect their young in a stressful situation when physically threatened, as fleeing too soon might leave a young animal defenseless. Hormonal factors in the two sexes also play a role in the different reactions to stress. Males under stress produce androgens such as testosterone (making them more aggressive when under stress) in addition to stress hormones such as adrenalin, noradrenalin and cortisol. Studies suggest that women produce oxytocin, which induces a feeling of relaxation, reduces fear, and decreases some components of the fight-or-flight response. Oxytocin is also involved in childbirth and social interaction. In the past, stress behaviour like aggression and withdrawal have been studied, while important behaviors like bonding and affiliation, have been totally overlooked. Calling on your friends when you’re stressed, might be a modern manifestation of one of the oldest biological stress response systems in human beings.
