Today, we know a lot about how the human body reacts to stress, and biologically speaking, it makes a lot of sense that stress-responses in modern working life so easily can become dysfunctional and destructive.

Understanding how and why the human body reacts to stress the way it does can be very helpful in terms of stress prevention and management.

It makes it easier to take stress seriously, to make intelligent choices in relation to stress, and to understand why it is unconstructive to overrule and ignore stress symptoms.

We hope you will have fun exploring all these interesting and complex facets of biological reactions to stress and that this knowledge may serve you in taking good care of yourself and others.

We wish you an inspired,
calm and conscious state of mind.

Stress can be defined as our physical and psychological reaction to a challenge or threat. A reaction to a change in our inner or outer environment.

Our bodies and psyches react to stress in multiple ways. Many of these reactions are healthy and even important.

However! When we are stressed over a prolonged period of time stress reactions can become dysfunctional and dangerous for your health.

Today we explore healthy and unhealthy stress reactions from the perspective of the human body.

Becoming conscious about the difference between healthy and unhealthy stress can help you on the path to efficient prevention and management of stress.

We wish you an inspired,
calm and conscious state of mind

The fight or flight response is designed to help us
handle and survive adversity, threats and challenges.

The fight-or-flight response can be an awesome superpower, but in relation to a lot of modern challenges, it can become quite dysfunctional and a common cause of work stress.

Today, we explore the nature of the flight-or-fight response.

Becoming more conscious about the flight-or-fight response, can help you understand unhealthy bodily reactions to stressful situations.

We wish you an inspired,
calm and conscious state of mind.

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis is a hormonal communication system doing a lot of the work in a flight-or-flight-response.  

Learning about and becoming conscious of the HPA-axis, can help you make intelligent choices regarding unhealthy forms of stress.

We wish you an inspired,
calm and conscious state of mind.

The amygdala is a small almond-shaped structure
situated deep in the brain.

It is heavily involved with stress reactions and with reactions of fear and aggression.

If we could manually relax the amygdala, we would be good at managing stress reactions.

Meditation seems to be a move in that direction. A hyperactive and hypersensitive amygdala can make it difficult to manage stress reactions.

Becoming conscious of the functions of the amygdala can help you better find the most intelligent remedies for and interpretations of stressful situations.

We wish you an inspired,
calm and conscious state of mind.

Cortisol is a naturally occurring, steroid hormone.
It is involved in the regulation of blood sugar levels and metabolism.

It also has the capacity to suppress the immune system. Cortisol levels in the blood change in relation to stress.

So healthy cortisol levels indicate good stress management. Understanding cortisol helps us understand our bodies, and thus, how to best manage stress.

We wish you an inspired,
calm and conscious state of mind.

The sympathetic nervous system is excitatory. The parasympathetic nervous system helps the body calm down.

The tone of our vagus nerve and our heart rate variability provides measurements that can help us understand the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity in the nervous system.

Breathing exercises and meditation may help prompt relaxing parasympathetic activity.

Imagining these two opposing parts of the nervous system may help us better manage our stress.

It may help us make intelligent decisions
in support of relaxing parasympathetic activity.

We wish you an inspired,
calm and conscious state of mind.

When we are stressed, our bodies downplay the energy we use on digestion.

If we are stressed for a prolonged period of time, our digestion and our gut microbiome will suffer.

An unhealthy gut microbiome can be related to a long list of problems.  

From skin problems to depression and anxiety. So taking good care of our gut microbiome is important.

And, managing stress is an important way of doing so.

Becoming conscious about how stress influences our gut microbiome may help us take stress seriously.

And, to better understand the adverse consequences of work stress.

We wish you an inspired,
calm and conscious state of mind.

When we are stressed our bodies think we are in danger.

When we are stressed our bodies want to keep us awake until we have solved the issues on our minds.

The sympathetic nervous system is activated.
The HPA-axis is doing its thing and hormones invoke alertness and wakefulness.

Being deprived of sleep because of stress often makes it more difficult to deal with stress. This creates a negative feedback loop.

In this perspective, managing stress is pivotal to healthy sleep patterns. And healthy sleep patterns are important in the prevention and management of stress.

We wish you an inspired,
calm and conscious state of mind.