Health & Wellbeing
DR NASRIN (NAS) PARSIAN Holistic and Emotional Health Consultant and Educator, Academic Nurse Stress is indeed natural where your body reacts to a different situation. So, whenever you are in a different and unknown situation your body tries to maintain a balance, maintain the homeostasis, and protect itself from the attack of the unknown or emergency alarm. Stress is indeed a series of events that your body follows to adapt with those situations. This is sometimes called acute or situational stress. It’s short term, coming and going very quickly. And generally, it’s generally recognised with symptoms such as anger, anxiety and sometimes acute periods of depression.
What is Stress and Why is it so Important to Heal? “My physical body is a temple of the living spirit, which animates it, rebuilds it after the image of its own perfection and keeps it in perfect health, harmony and wholeness.” Ernest Holmes I am going to begin a series of discussions on a topic, which is basically most of the time the main cause of both mental and physical conditions, and unfortunately it is something that has been missed out in our healthcare system. Indeed, you may talk or hear about it a lot, but practically you are not doing something about it. We desperately need to find a solution for it because eventually it can damage your whole body. Stress is my topic today. Why is it important and what it really is? Stress is generally a way by which the body overcomes a demanding or undesirable situation as sometimes it might not be undesirable. For example, if someone is going to experience an adventure, which is stressful, it’s something that they, they chose, it’s not, undesirable or unwanted situation, but see this is stressful and this kind of stress actually brings some thrilled and joyful excitement. 14 | eYs Magazine, Autumn 2021
If it occurs very often and frequently, then it is called episodic stress. Some people experience it due to a series of stressful and challenging situations they are carrying in their lives, one after the other, especially when they go through an incredibly stressful life transition or so. When stress persists for a longer period, then it is called chronic stress. And this is something that can cause disease and illness. So, let’s just do not forget that the key is the body’s response. So, the stress is not bad by itself, the body’s response is a key, which is something important. Your body is indeed going to save you, save itself. So, the stages of the body’s response start with an initial alarm, then adaptation and finally recovery or if the recovery doesn’t happen, exhaustion. The alarm is the very first stage, which is involved basically with fight and flight responses. Let’s shortly discuss the autonomic nervous system. Fight or flight is the job of the autonomic nervous system. Body is getting prepared either to face the perceived threat or to escape from it. So, this is all about fight or flight. There are Central Nervous System (CNS) and Peripheral Nervous System (PNS) in human’s body. So the central nervous system has indeed the main responsibility to make the order. CNS is consisting of the brain and spinal cord. So, all body sensations and changes in our external environment, or received from the receptors and sense organs go to the CNS to be interpreted.
The second part is the peripheral nervous system, which is indeed carrying all the messages from periphery to the central nervous system. The Peripheral Nervous System has two subdivisions, the sensory system, including all sensory neurons that carry information from receptors in the periphery of the body, to the brain and spinal cord; and the motor system, carrying information from the brain and the spinal cord to muscles and glands motor system; which can be further subdivided into two subcategories, somatic nervous system, which conducts impulses from the brain and spinal cord to skeletal muscle and causing us to respond or react to changes in our environment. The second branch of the motor system is the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), which conducts impulses from the brain and spinal cord to smooth muscle tissue, cardiac muscle tissues, and glands. ANS is considered to be involuntary. So, it means its function is automatic. That means, you know, we do not think about what is happening because of autonomic nervous system function. You do not think about how our heart is beating. You do not think about how the lungs are functioning and how the breathing process. You do not think, and you do not have any control on the gastrointestinal system to digest your foods. You do not think about how the food is just passing through the digestive system to, to the intestine and bowel. So, there is no thinking about any stages of body function, which are under control of your autonomic nervous system. So, the organs are affected by this system, receive a nerve from two divisions, sympathetic division and parasympathetic division sympathetic division stimulates or speed up activity and parasympathetic division speed down activities. So, one is stimulating and the other one is indeed slowing down. So, it is very much like what is happening in your driving, when you use an accelerator and brake, and you make a balance between the two to have a safe drive. So, the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions can create the desirable health conditions in our body.
