The Body of Stress
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— Intro People often use the word stress interchangeably with anxiety, feeling anxious, fearful, nervous, overwhelmed, panic, or stressed-out. Stress is the body’s natural defense against real or imagined danger. It flushes the body with hormones to prepare systems to evade or confront danger. This is known as the “fight-or-flight or freeze” response. The body in this threatening situation is an intelligent operating system, but the body -as we know it- can not determine the difference between a real external life threat, from an imagined or perceived threatening stressor. This makes the neurobiology of stress a complex operating mechanism. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), there are three different types of stress: acute stress, episodic acute stress, and chronic stress. Where each requires a different method of treatment through interventions, management, and psychological modalities, due to the nature of the lived environment, developmental history, coping resources, and personality. Considering the vastness of this topic, this chapter focuses only on understanding chronic stress from a biological point of view, to better understand our inner environments and outer spatial ones. Different points are tackled here in regards to: How can we define chronic stress? How does it operate in the brain and body? How chronic stress is linked to experience dependent genes?
¶ Chronic stress
— The experience All of us are built for dealing with short term bursts of healthy stress. When the stressful event is over , the body normally returns to balance within hours, increasing its energy levels and restoring its vital resources. But in the case of chronic stress, the stress does not end within hours, and the body might never return to balance for hours or days. Because of our large brains, human beings are capable of thinking about their problems, reliving past events, or even forecasting future worst-case situations and thus turning on the cascade 10
