digestive issues

Stress Can Cause Obesity to Spiral Out of Control

When you’re under stress, it can cause you to gain weight. This happens when there are issues in your professional or personal life and your emotions come under fire. You get angry or sad or anxious and your body starts pushing to produce more cortisol, which is known as the stress hormone.

It does this in response to your emotions because it’s trying to protect you. But it can do more harm than good. Thanks to having more of this hormone in your body, it pushes your glucose levels up.

This process is done by pulling the stored glucose from your liver. If you’re faced with a life or death situation, then this is a good thing. But when it’s not, this elevated cortisol boosts the amount of glucose your body gets where it then remains in the blood stream.

This raises the levels of your blood sugar and makes you hungry. The more stress that you deal with, the hungrier you become. This is a defense mode for your body even when you’re not in a fight or flight mode.

Your body is trying to prepare you for whatever you’re dealing with. You can start to crave foods every time you get upset and it becomes a cycle. You get stressed, you turn to food for emotional eating, you eat too much, and you gain weight.

When this cortisol level starts to go up, your body doesn’t want fruits and vegetables. It craves the fried and fatty foods. It wants sugar and fast foods. The reason that your body craves food in these categories is because they’re known to soothe emotions.

You’ll feel better – if only for a little while. Most of the time, when you get scared and experience that flight or fight response, your cortisol spike is only temporary. As soon as you’re no longer in fear, the cortisol returns to its pre-fear state.

Stress, on the other hand, keeps that cortisol at a higher level and it remains that way until you eat something – which is why many people learn to associate food as a stress reliever.

When you eat comfort food, your body gives you a boost of the feel good chemical in your brain. So you get a burst of endorphins and all feels right in the world. You don’t feel stressed any longer.

But you can gain weight and cause obesity to spiral out of control in your life if you don’t take the necessary action in order to deal with the stress. If you learn what to do in order to manage your stress, you can break the connection between stress and weight gain.

Stress Can Worsen Diabetes Symptoms

Diabetes is the kind of disease that requires careful monitoring. When diabetes is under control, you can live a normal life. But when you have stress to deal with, then this can worsen the symptoms that come along with the disease.

Stress can be so damaging for those with diabetes because it interferes with your ability to keep glucose levels within a healthy range. Any time you feel stress, your body releases hormones in response and this raises your glucose.

Because this kind of reactional glucose isn’t used by you during the stress, it remains in the bloodstream. Whenever you have glucose in the bloodstream, you get a blood sugar spike.

What some diabetics don’t realize is that this kind of spike has nothing to do with food. So you can end up out of a healthy range even when you’re not eating food that raises the levels.

In fact, you don’t even have to eat at all to get higher levels. It’s all happening because of the stress. When your body is under a constant battle of blood sugar spikes, this can affect you physically as well as emotionally.

It can become difficult to control your diabetes. You won’t be able to do it by tightening up your eating habits, since that’s not the root cause. When your body releases cortisol in response to stress and it pushes your levels up, the only way to get it to back down is to deal with the stress head on.

What you may not realize is that a stress response for people with diabetes also affects how your body is using and storing fat. When you get stressed, you can gain more visceral fat.

That’s because there’s a molecule in the body that will trigger the fat cells and prompt them to multiply – all thanks to stress. You can struggle to control your glucose levels, and you can gain more fat – but you can also enter a stage of deeper level of insulin resistance, which will further impair your ability to fight back against and control your diabetes.

You may end up needing more medication – or diminish your health to the point where you’re having to take insulin injections. Stress can affect your diet and make you want to eat more as well as eat more of the wrong kinds of food.

This can contribute to glucose spikes and worsen your diabetes symptoms. But stress can also cause insomnia, which worsens how your body fares with having diabetes. This can cause you to feel tired, affect you emotionally and contribute to your stress levels.

The best thing that you can do for your diabetes is to get your stress under control. Learn healthy ways to cope so that when a stressor occurs, it doesn’t have to impact your disease.

Stress Will Defeat Your Anti Aging Efforts

You can have stress in your life from a variety of sources and it can be emotional or physical, but the impact caused by any type of stress affects your anti-aging efforts.
You’ll notice that your immune system doesn’t react the way that it should.

You might not have as much energy as you once had. Your ability to concentrate on things can become a problem, too. This happens because stress ages the body. You might be young, but feel much older physically as a result of the toll that stress takes on your body.

Stress can cause your blood pressure to go up. It can also cause you to develop aches and pains and lose sleep. The body is being affected because of the release of hormones that happens when you get stressed.

Over time, these stress-released hormones can even affect your memory retention. But what else it does inside your body is it revs up the aging process. When you’re under stress, it can make your body much older than what it actually is.

That’s because stress shortens your telomeres. Your telomeres are like caps on your chromosomes and their job is to conserve the chromosome. They’re like gatekeepers and work to keep your chromosomes healthy and functioning properly.

Stress shortens these gatekeepers, which allows damage to occur to your chromosomes. One problem that occurs is the increasing the rate at which your body ages because the cells get shorter faster than they normally would.

This is not a little bit of aging, either. Stress can age your body years and even decades – rapidly, which shortens your lifespan. Not only does it damage your telomeres, but it ages your brain.

You can develop age-related conditions like dementia, confusion and more all because of stress. It can affect your vision and your hearing as well, causing diminished abilities and even loss.

The reason that this happens is because when the body encounters stress, your adrenals boost production of hormones. These hormones can cause your blood pressure to rise, which affects your vision.

When you develop pressure in the eyes, it causes blurriness and can cause eye strain and light sensitivity. It can also worsen the side effects of any current eye condition you have.

Stress affects your ears because it limits the amount of blood flow by tightening your blood vessels. When the ears have a limited amount of blood, it causes damage by hurting the auditory cells.

When the stress is chronic, you can experience hearing loss. Some people who have stress may also develop tinnitus. When stress affects the eyes and ears, reducing the stress so that the cortisol and adrenaline are returned to normal usually restores vision and hearing.

Is Your Hair Thinning Due to Stress?

Your hair has three phases during its growth cycle. The first one is the anagen phase. This is the part of hair growth that can last for years and the length of the years can vary according to the genetic makeup of the person.

The second stage of hair growth is known as the catagen phase. This part is considerably shorter and lasts just over a week or so. Finally, the hair cycle goes into the telogen phase and this lasts about twelve weeks.

It’s during this part that you’ll notice you might lose strands of your hair. When your hair is in this phase, it’s known as the resting stage. Once the resting stage is complete, the hair growth cycle starts over with the anagen phase.

Stress disrupts this cycle. While it might seem like a myth that stress affects the hair, it does – and both men and women can go bald and it can happen whether you’re young or old.

Stress is one of the main reasons that your hair thins and you develop patchy hair growth and baldness. Stress thinning of the hair is known as telogen effluvium. When you experience this type of stress-affected hair thinning, the cycle of hair growth is broken.

Instead of completing the healthy growth cycle, the stress causes the hair to quit growing. When the hair’s growth cycle is changed, it makes your hair start to fall out.
This stage is when you get the thinning areas and baldness.

You might see one bald patch or you might see several. You may first notice it when you bow your head and look in a mirror. Though stress can thin the hair on the scalp, you can also start to lose hair in other places on your body if your stress is severe or is chronic.

It can take several months for the hair to resume its normal cycle. But the good news is that when your hair thins because of stress, you can restore your hair. As soon as you get rid of the stress and your body is no longer dealing with it, your hair growth resumes its natural ability.

That’s why it’s important not to let stress linger in your life. There’s no set time for when your hair will stop thinning. The speed at which it grows back will vary from person to person.

Some of this will depend on the types of foods that you’re eating. A healthy diet can promote good hair growth and so can certain vitamins and minerals. You’ll want to make sure that you take vitamins known to promote healthy hair growth such as Vitamin B. Consume foods rich in Vitamin C, too – since it helps the body make collagen, which is necessary for hair growth.

Can Stress Cause Digestive Issues?

You might notice that whenever you’re stressed, you feel it in your stomach. Everything tightens up and you just get a feeling of dread or it feels like you have knots. That response is a physical manifestation of what’s going on emotionally as a reaction to stress.

But not only can you get pain in your stomach, but you can also get digestive issues, too. That’s because the mind and the body are working in tandem with each other. There’s an information highway between your brain and your digestive track.

Your digestive system contains neurons and the information sent can be impacted by what you feel that’s caused by the stress. Whenever you’re upset, your brain is sending out the signals that there’s a problem.

Everything is tightening up and your body is on high alert. Hormones are being released in abundance and you feel the effects. The brain is sending out warnings to your digestive system and it always responds.

So when you’re feeling the stress, your body gets these signals and can experience physical pain or other issues anywhere – but especially in the gut. Studies have shown that stress is a leading cause in receiving negative reactions from your digestive system.

There are numerous ways your digestive system will react. For example, stress can cause you to develop stomach cramps – the kind of cramps that make you lose your appetite and think you’re coming down with something.

You might have been fine before, but then you started feeling anxious as a result of the stressor, and the next thing you know, you’re clutching your stomach. Or you’ll start to feel bloated or even nauseous.

Stress can cause inflammation in your gastrointestinal system, too. You can develop issues with gas in your digestive system and experience pain from this. Every area of your digestive system can be affected by stress because it can disrupt the normal process.

Your heart beats faster, your blood pressure increases and all of a sudden, you have indigestion. You feel sick to your stomach. In some cases, if the stress is prolonged, it can lead to episodes of vomiting.

Sometimes, stress can impact your digestive system to the point where it underperforms. When that happens, you can end up with constipation. Other times, it might kick your digestive system into high gear, and you develop diarrhea.

Or, you can swing between constipation and diarrhea. That’s because stress can cause the system to slow down or it can speed it up. Stress can cause the production of stomach acid to rev up and you end up with more than you need.

When you get this excess of stomach acid, it can lead to ulcers. The gut bacteria in your digestive system can be affected because of stress. When this gets out of balance, it can cause any conditions that you have to experience an increase in side effects.