I’ve heard it multiple times that stress is the worst enemy. But how exactly is stress an enemy to body, like how does long term exposure to stress increase risks of getting diseases?
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Stress focuses bodily resources to handle a potentially dangerous situation. This takes away resources from things that normally happens during rest, such as growth, healing, digestion, relaxation etc. This is very useful in the short term if you’re in actual danger, but very detrimental in the long run.
There is a hormone your body produces when under stress called cortisol. That hormone is responsible regulating a wide range of bodily functions. It’s only meant to be present at high levels occasionally. If it’s present continuously for a long period of time, it can cause significant problems.
Stress isn’t just a state of mind, it’s a hormone in your body that activates a wide range of responses in your body.
That range overall takes resources away from processes that happen normally, like regeneration, digestion, immune defense and growth, and give those resources to processes that help you fight back against a threat, like muscles.
In a short period it’s incredibly useful, on the long run it’s damaging.
Because psychological states of mind are rooted in physical changes within your brain, and stress — whether running from a tiger to save your life, or working three jobs to feed your kids on one income — produce the exact same physical changes. Chronic stress, regardless of source, produces profoundly elevated levels of cortisol, often called ‘the stress hormone,’ which causes genuine and significant physiological changes in the operation of your adrenal glands (which produce even more cortisol and several other steroid hormones) and just about every other organ in your body — they’re all made of cells, and every nucleus in every cell in your body is listening to several steroid hormones to decide what to do next.
Stress of any kind produces marked biological changes outside normal operating parameters with downstream effects on every cell in your body.
My ELI5 answer would be that your brain is an imperfect soup with imperfect methods that are not adapted to the way we live today. If you thought you were running from a tiger every day for decades at a time, you’d probably develop liver disease and cancer a lot quicker too. For people in chronically stressful conditions, that is literally what every cell of their body believes to be happening.
Your body is designed to have an optimal (long life and health) mode. This includes exercise, nutrition, heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar and many other features that we don’t fully understand.
Anything else is less than optimal for long life. Fear puts your body into overdrive. If you can outrun that lion or beat down that bully you may live longer than you would without that fear / adrenaline / heart rate boost / and everything else that goes with it.
Generally fear makes your body ignore long term health in favour of short term performance (fight / flight / mate). Stress is just another word for long term fear. It tells you body to ignore long term good health conditions.
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