How mental stress affects muscle growth

Do stress levels at work or home affect muscle growth? Absolutely - but there are things that you can do about it.

Cortisol

You've probably heard of the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is released as a response to stress and one of its primary roles is to give your body the energy it needs to fight off or escape a potential threat. Cortisol stimulates energy production and immune response. Cortisol levels are naturally higher in the morning and taper off throughout the day until they reach their lowest before bed time and during sleep. This makes sure that you have the energy that you need throughout the day while ensuring that you can get the recovery that you need at night. People with cortisol levels that are too low have constant fatigue and vulnerable immune systems. Healthy cortisol levels are good for you, but too much is not good either. Your body needs periods of low stress (and lowered cortisol) to calm down and recover. Thinking about stressful things at night can increase cortisol levels, which puts your body into a fight-or-flight response when it needs to start the recovery process instead.

One of the benefits of regular exercise is that it teaches the body to deal with stress. Exercise improves the way that cortisol is used by providing an outlet for the energy that cortisol creates. It also ensures that we don't experience the negative effects of too much cortisol production. Exercise tricks our bodies into thinking that a potentially harmful (or stressful) situation is over and that it can go back into rest and recovery mode. Too much exercise, though, can elevate cortisol levels. Physical stress (or physical exertion) can also trigger the release of cortisol. In order to recover sufficiently, our bodies need periods of low stress to enter its rest mode. If mental stress from work and physical stress from exercise releases more cortisol than what your body can recover from, your body will spend too much time in overdrive and too little time in recovery. Exercise can help you to deal with mental stress, but only to a certain point until it becomes too much. How do you make sure that you aren't stressing more than what your body can handle? Make sure that you balance out overall stressful situations with relaxing ones. Mental tranquility triggers speedy physical recovery. There is nothing wrong with feeling a little stress every now and then, but you need to make sure that you make time to feel relaxed. You can do this by spending time with a loved one, enjoying a hobby or through positive reflection. Doing these things at night will increase sleep quality.

Tension

Tension is one of the ways that cortisol affects muscle tissue. Cortisol tenses muscles so that they are primed for action. In nature, this would help you to make the fast movements that you need to eat (catch prey) or avoid being eaten. Think of the muscular tension as your muscles' version of 'standby mode'. As great as this is for action, it's not so great for recovery. Your muscles need to get out of 'standby mode' and enter 'rest mode' to grow. Tensed muscles cannot recover as well and relaxed muscles. If mental stress increases muscular tension, they will take longer to recover from exercise.

Exercise can decrease tension caused by stress, but prolonged physical stimulus and increased tension from non-exercise stress without sufficient relaxation can severely decrease the amount of optimal recovery time that your muscles need. If you feel like your muscles are negatively affected by stress, here are 7 ways to decrease the effects of stress from work. If work stress creates muscular tension, exercising after work will release the tension and give you the evening and night's sleep to recover. Applying heat (like through a hot bath or sitting in the sauna), stretching regularly, massage and aromatherapy are great ways to relieve tension and speed up muscle recovery.

Poor decisions

Stress can also negatively impact muscle growth by negatively impacting the decisions that you make. Stress can cause us to make unhealthy decisions in an attempt to cope with that stress. Drinking alcohol negatively affects muscle growth, and so does smoking. Irregular sleeping habits and erratic diet choices are other ways that our attempts to cope with stress can lead to decisions that hamper muscle growth.

In the above ways, mental stress can have an indirectly negative affect on muscle growth. Some stress is not too bad, but when you stress more than you relax; you risk sacrificing muscle because of it. Stay Strong!

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