Why is stress bad for you?
In: Biology
Physically, stress causes blood pressure to rise, as does exercise. When you exercise, all that pressure has somewhere to go – your muscles that are craving sustenance. When you’re just stressed that pressure has nowhere to go and just pushes outward on your blood vessels, which weakens them over time. There are places in your body, mostly your brain, where you don’t want weak blood vessels.
Mentally (via physical responses), stress causes a nearly constant low-level fight-or-flight response via adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline’s job is basically to make you on alert and hyper awake. This makes it very hard to focus, sleep, and make good decisions since you’re basically viewing every single little thing as a potential threat and you have a hormone pumping through your body which only exists to help you make snap reflexive decisions.
To note uncontrolled stress is bad for you, when someone else controls your deadlines, workload etc. it is bad when you set your own even though it can be stressful it isn’t generally detrimental
Chronically elevated levels of cortisol in the bloodstream (such as those associated with chronic stress) have been shown to impair cognitive performance, suppress thyroid function, and promote hyperglycemia (high blood sugar).
Cortisol is a hormone. Hormones are molecules with great power in the body. Unlike most other molecules or chemicals, cortisol has many sites of action as the body evolved to use hormones to coordinate processes that require synchrony. Cortisol is mostly associated with the processes involved in metabolism as it promotes the availability of glucose by increasing the amount that is in the bloodstream. When normal systems are stimulated beyond what is tolerable (for example, chronically elevated blood sugar), pathology can occur (diabetes).
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