Living in Disharmony: The Real Stress

4. You notice the aches in your belly — that you’re feeling a bit weak and dizzy and that you’re irritable. 5. Your conscious brain understands that you’re hangry. 6. Your conscious brain remembers that eating food will help you feel better. 7. You eat. 8. Your blood sugar goes back to normal. 9. The message travels to the brain. 10. The brain turns off the stress response as dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins flood your brain. 11. The result of all this activity is that you now feel happy and satiated.

To continue with this scenario, if you can’t manage to find food, the stress of having low blood sugar doesn’t get fixed. In fact, the problem grows worse, as do your symptoms, so the stress response keeps firing. This causes your blood pressure and heart rate to remain high, as stress hormones fly through your body and muscles remain tense. And, this is in addition to the fact that you’re starving. This is considered a negative feedback loop.

Aside from your dying of hunger, an unchecked stressed response that results from a perpetual negative feedback loop can also be problematic. If left unchecked, physiological responses that are meant to be beneficial in the short term can become harmful as they rage on. Heightened blood pressure can turn into heart disease; muscle tension, into fibromyalgia; negative mood, into dysphoria and depression; heightened inflammation, into a wide variety of immune disorders; and focused thinking, into myopia and an inability to make sound decisions.

The reason I explain this concept to you is that this negative feedback loop, and an unchecked stress response, happens all the time and most people don’t even realize it. They don’t realize that they’re living in constant disharmony until one day they find that their body has to fight a virus, recover from an accident, or withstand the stress of moving homes — and their body can’t handle it. They get sick.

You might be starting to understand the real problem with stress: It’s not just the stress that is problematic but also the stress response itself. Disharmony breeds more disharmony, which leads to a bigger stress load, which weakens the mind and the body.