Stress Symptoms – Their Effect on Our Whole Body and Mind

How stress impinges upon us can vary in degrees of strength and enormity. Each of us has a stress trigger level that is either highly sensitive, non invasive, or somewhere in between.

Whether we are highly sensitive and react instantly to stressor triggers depends on our life pattern of response, and what we have done or not done to get to that place.

The symptoms of stress are so wide and varied that what affects one person may not affect another at all. However, how we arrive at symptoms means that we have ignored several or many messages that we have received via our emotions, our mental state, our physical body or our overall happiness state, our spirit.

Our emotions tell us when we need to look at what is running our life and how we “should” react in order to avoid mild, chronic or acute symptoms. These are symptoms that have been received in our bodies, either as discomfort or as a small niggle or a mild pain, but have been ignored by us. The unfortunate thing is that these mild symptoms can turn into deeper level stresses and eventually cause disease and body-part break-downs.

The mild symptoms can include: having trouble concentrating, having time management issues, taking longer and longer to do tasks either at work or at home, having trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, becoming quick to anger or annoyance, being impatient, lacking in energy, feelings of low self esteem, lacking in confidence, and so on. The list can be never-ending. The issue is not that they appear, it is what we do when these mild stress symptoms appear.

How people generally deal with these mild-type of stress symptoms and triggers is to try to put them out of their minds, or ingest or do something more pleasant. If you are: having more coffee, taking more sugar or eating more sugary carbohydrates, smoking more, drinking or taking drugs, either prescription or otherwise in order to alleviate these symptoms, then you are avoiding the underlying real issue. The real issue can be: I am not coping emotionally, physically or mentally and I really need to do something here. I need to change what I am doing, change my environment or get some help with stress reduction techniques.

The problem is that most people try to totally ignore these stress triggers, or they do not recognise that they are stressed, as putting your hand up and admitting that you are stressed could be seen as being a failure and not being able to cope in your present environment.

The effect on our bodies can be devastating in that stress causes a huge influx of acidic hormones to flood our systems. This causes an imbalance in our leptin, our blood sugar and our insulin as increased blood sugar leads to an increase in insulin. This is a one-way ticket to diabetes and other acidic related diseases, including obesity, heart disease and stroke.

The effects of this bodily chemical imbalance on our emotions means that we become jittery, nervous, anxious and so on. We cannot process effectively and hence instead of being able to respond to situations, we react, mostly, not being in control of our emotions.

The effects on us mentally are that being in a constant state of stress we are not able to think clearly and we make irrational choices. Chemically when acidic hormones keep flooding our systems the blood rushes from our logical brains to our external limbs. This makes us want to flee all of the time instead of being in control and being able to make rational decisions about how to cope.

The affects on our whole being, our spirit, means that we are depleted as an entity and not operating at our best potential. We lose touch with who we really are.

The only way to solve these issues and overcome stress symptoms permanently and be connected with who we really are is to deal with each aspect, one at a time or in conjunction with each other.