The Biologic Cost of Chronic Stress…

How to Bring the Body Back into Balance
By Jeffrey A. Morrison, M.D.

The problems associated with stress result from a complex interaction between the demands of the outside world and the body's capacity to manage these potential threats. This capacity is influenced by heredity, childhood experience, and lifestyle. Factors like diet, exercise, sleep patterns, close personal relationships, income level, and social status can all affect a person's ability to manage stress. Unfortunately, regardless of a person's innate capacity, normal stressors can eventually accumulate to the point that they overload a person's ability to adapt.

In moderate amounts, stress can be benign, and even beneficial. Most people are naturally equipped to accommodate these “normal” levels of stress. Whether delivering a speech, taking a test, or avoiding a speeding taxi, the body undergoes an elaborate series of programmed adjustments. These physiological processes are essential in mobilizing a response — the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the endocrine glands and the brain's regions involved in emotion and memory — all are recruited into action. In enabling the body to focus completely on these responses, nonessential functions such as reproduction and digestion are deferred until later.

As the body confronts challenging situations, epinephrine and cortisol (stress hormones secreted by the adrenal glands) flood the body. As a result, heart rate and blood pressure rise, respirations quickens, oxygen flows into the muscles, and in the case of an injury, immune cells prepare to rush to the damaged site. Once the individual has completed delivering the speech, taking a test, or avoiding a speeding car, another complex set of adjustments calm the body down to restore balance.

This process of returning to equilibrium, or homeostasis, is essential for good health and survival. However, this process was originally intended for the types of dangers humans might have encountered in an ancient and undeveloped world. The sudden appearance of a wild animal, for example, or a temporary shortage of food, were typically self-limited events that were interspersed with periods of rest and rejuvenation.

Today, on the other hand, we confront blaring car alarms, bosses with extremely high expectations, two-career marriages, traffic jams, and rude salesclerks that become incessant and unrelenting stressors that we are biologically unequipped to handle. When stressors persist for too long or become too severe, the normally protective homeostatic mechanisms become overburdened and the finely tuned feedback systems become disrupted. Over time, this causes significant damage to the body and leads to a condition often referred to as BURNOUT.

People try to treat, or self-medicate, their burnout with a wide range of quick fixes that only bring about temporary relief. Thrill seeking, infidelity, substance abuse, overeating, and workaholic behavior are all activities that relieve stress in the short-term but fail to resolve the underlying source of their anxiety. These stimulating events elevate low levels of endogenous hormones so that a person feels good. However, a person must engage in these indulgent behaviors repeatedly because the burnout at their core remains untreated.

Signs and Symptoms of burnout and chronic stress can include:

If the stress has been present for only a short period of time, or if a person is well adapted to handle longer bouts of stress, the symptoms of burnout are much easier to balance. Through adequate rest, exercise, and healthy eating plans, a person can quickly restore their body's equilibrium. However, in order to treat the more resistant symptoms that result from chronic stress, it is necessary to balance a highly specific and interrelated system of endocrine hormones.

This system is comprised of brain neurotransmitters, which include serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, GABA, and histamine. Also involved are the adrenal stress hormones, which include cortisol and epinephrine, the related sex hormones - testosterone, DHEA, progesterone and estrogen. The thyroid hormone is also significant as is the pancreatic hormone to modulate blood sugar - insulin.

When a person is suffering from perpetual stress, all of these hormone levels must be checked and restored to balance when necessary in order to correct the underlying physiological problems of burnout. Blood, saliva, and urine testing can expose which of these hormones are out of balance and specific dietary, nutritional and supplement suggestions can be made to return the body back to a state of homeostasis.

In a fast paced, high pressure and technologically booming society, it is almost inevitable that our bodies will be pushed to the limit and the effects of chronic stress will surface. We are not built to accommodate such frantic and continuous stimulation. When our compensatory systems fail or burnout, typical coping mechanisms like sleep, exercise and diet will not be enough to help us overcome this biological shutdown. Therefore, testing and treating these hormonal imbalances is crucial, as it is the most direct and efficient means for rebuilding the internal systems that allow us to function effectively in a modern world.