Stress is a feeling we all experience when we are challenged or overwhelmed. But more than just an emotion, stress is a hardwired physical response that travels throughout your entire body. In a short-term, stress can be advantageous by enabling you deliver on projects when due, but when activated too often or too long, your primitive fight or flight stress response not only changes your brain, but also damages many of the other organs and cells throughout your body.

Your adrenal gland releases the stress hormones; Cortisol Epinephrine, also known as adrenaline and Norepinephrine. As these hormones travel through your blood stream, they easily reach your blood vessels, and heart, adrenaline causes your heart to beat faster, and raising your blood pressure, overtime causing hypertension. Cortisol can also cause the endothelium or inner lining of blood vessels to not function normally. Scientists now know that this is an early step in triggering the process of atherosclerosis or cholesterol plaque buildup in your arteries. Together, these changes increase your chances of a heart attack or stroke.

When your brain senses stress, it activates your autonomic nervous system. Through this network of connections, your brain communicates stress to your enteric or intestinal nervous system. This brain-gut connection can disturb the natural rhythmic contractions that move food through your gut, leading to irritable bowel syndrome and can increase your gut sensitivity to acid; making you more likely to feel heartburn. Via the gut’s nervous system, stress can also change the composition and function of your gut bacteria which may affect your digestive and overall health.

Cortisol can increase your appetite. It tells your body to replenish with energy dense foods and carbs, causing you to crave comfort foods. High levels of cortisol can also cause you to put on those extra calories as visceral or deep belly fat. This type of fat doesn’t just make you obese; it is an organ that releases hormones and immune system chemicals called Cytokines; that can increase your risk of developing chronic diseases such as heart disease and insulin resistance. Meanwhile, stress hormones affect immune cells in a variety of ways; initially, they help prepare to fight invaders and heal after injury, but chronic stress can dampen function of some immune cells, making you more susceptible to infections and slow the rate you heal.

As if all that weren’t enough, chronic stress has even more ways it can sabotage your health, including; acne, hair loss, sexual dysfunction, headaches, muscle tension, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, and irritability. So what do all these mean for you? Your life will always be filled with stressful situations. But what matters to your brain and entire body is how you respond to this stress. If you can view those situations as challenges you can control, rather than threats that are insurmountable, you will perform better in the short run, and stay healthy in the long run.