Stressball, VI; More On Stress
Today I’ll be spending some time continuing yesterday’s Stressball V post. I am both prepping for the quiz (all this stuff will be on my quiz on Thursday at 2pm, wish me luck if you read it before then!) and educating my blog-readers. I’m so very happy with this circle!
There are three different types of stress:
eustress: a good stress (planning a wedding, learning your planned pregnancy is going great, winning an athletic competition),
neustress: neither good nor bad stress (a tornado hitting an unoccupied land would be neustress), and
distress: a bad stress, it can be both acute as well as chronic (failing a test, not being able to pay a certain bill, being stuck in a traffic jam)
Stress will throw a person’s homeostasis out of whack. Don’t know what homeostasis is? It’s the state of being the same - where all of your physiological systems (blood sugar levels, temperature and heart rate are examples) are in balanced & optimal level. This “optimal level” varies with the environment and it’s current demands. Stress is your body’s response to a “fight or flight” and a struggle to return to homeostasis.
I was fascinated to hear that it’s not actually time that makes a person grow old; it is their allostatic load - the wear & tear on your entire bodily system - that makes a person grow older. This picture is a good diagram of allostatic load. (It is actually the picture that Dr. Wheeler used in her presentation, too! I linked it there because it’s not a great size up there!)
Since all of our stress is funneled through the same place in our body, Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome shows that the more stress we encounter, the larger our adrenal cortex becomes. (The AC is the source of our adrenaline and epinephrine release.) Stress hormones (both adrenal hormones & cortisol) are released. The lymph glands shrink and humans can even end up with gastrointestinal ulcerations!
mental & emotional health, stress, Portland State University, Claire Wheeler, public health education, adrenal cortex, endocrine response to stress
October 4th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
The actual physiological effects of stress are pretty overwhelming when you get them in detail like that! I know I’ve studied this at some point in the last five years … Thanks for the refresher!
Amanda
October 6th, 2007 at 8:03 am
[...] DNA by Sarah Gould I’m still working on continuing sharing what I’ve learned from my recent PHE 363 lectures on stress. (I did well on the quiz today, for anyone who remembered that I had it! I think I may have even [...]
October 6th, 2007 at 9:47 am
I get nasty stomach aches when I’m stressed. I’m convinced some day I’ll wake up with an ulcer. Ah, to be young and yet not.
October 18th, 2007 at 3:28 am
[...] Read this great post here [...]