Generally curious..
In: Biology
It’s kind of an evolutionary leftover.
Your stress response is part of your fight or flight mechanism. You come under attack and your body prepares itself to fight or escape: Your heart rate picks up, you breathe harder and faster, your blood pressure increases, your blood stream is flooded with adrenaline… all the things you need to make you more alert, more resistant to pain, able to fight harder or run faster.
The problem is our fight or flight response evolved to deal with physical threats like predators. Short term crises. As cavemen we were born, we hunted and foraged for food, we reproduced and died. Our stress response was perfectly suited to that sort of lifestyle.
Today, most of our stress comes from non-physical factors, things that last way longer than it takes to stick a spear into a wolf or run like hell from a lion… and our stress response can’t tell the difference between being physically threatened and getting an unexpected bill we can’t pay, or worry about losing our job because we heard our company is downsizing.
Basically, think of your body’s stress response as gunning a car’s engine and hitting the NOS. It gives a massive increase in performance, but the engine isn’t designed to take that amount of stress for long periods of time
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