Woman holding her face because of stress

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Are you cramming for a test or trying to get more things done than what you have time for? Stress is a part of life and all of us go through it.

Stress is a feeling that we all experience when we are challenged or overwhelmed. Stress is more than a simple emotion. It is a hardwired, physical response that travels throughout your entire body.

Why do we have a stress response?

In the short term, stress can be advantageous. It primes our bodies for focus and energy when we need it the most. It helps us to escape from danger or catch our next meal.

If stress is natural, why is it bad for us?

When the stress response is activated too often or for too long, the primitive fight or flight stress response changes your brain. It also damages many of the other organs and cells throughout your body.

It's like kicking your body into overdrive for much longer than what it can handle.

We need periods of high activity and deep rest. We run into problems when we stress too much and even if we rest too much.

Stress increases energy levels, but too much stress stops rest and recovery. This leads to overdrive and break down of your internal systems when they can't recover.

How does stress affect your health?

Your adrenal gland releases certain stress hormones. These include cortisol (the primary stress hormone), epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) and norepinephrine.

Cortisol is a stress hormone that your body uses to communicate a state of stress throughout the body when you are mentally or physically stressed.

Adrenaline relates to inward feelings and functions. This hormone increases energy so that you can get through the stressful task at hand. It functions in the brain and body as a hormone and a neurotransmitter.

The effects of stress on your heart, blood vessels, arteries and blood pressure

As these hormones travel through your bloodstream, they easily reach your blood vessels and heart.

Adrenaline causes your heart to beat faster and raises your blood pressure. This is a normal response, but causes hypertension over time if left unchecked.

Cortisol can also cause the endothelium, or inner lining of blood vessels, to not function normally over time. This negatively affects blood circulation (and is one of the reasons why relaxation improves blood circulation).

This is an early step in triggering the process of atherosclerosis (building up of fats) or cholesterol plaque buildup in your arteries.

Stress increases the risk for heart attack and stroke

Together, these changes increase your chances of a heart attack or stroke.

When your brain senses stress, it activates your autonomic nervous system (fight or flight response).

Too much stress with too little rest increases your risk for heart attack and stroke.

The health effects of stress on digestion

Through the network of nerve connections, our brain communicates stress to your enteric, or intestinal, nervous system.

Besides causing butterflies in your stomach, this brain-gut connection can disturb the natural rhythmic contractions that move food through your gut.

This will lead to irritable bowel syndrome and increase your gut sensitivity to acid of it goes on for too long. You will then be 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.

Stress causes change in the gut bacteria that you need to stay healthy.

Too much stress disrupts digestion, increases heartburn and changes your health gut bacteria.

Does stress cause weight gain?

Chronic (long term) stress affects your waistline.

Excess stress leads to weight gain. Cortisol can increase your appetite.

It tells your body to replenish your energy stores with energy dense foods like carbs. It does this to hoard extra energy in preparation for the stressful event. This causes 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.

How does stress affect the immune system?

Stress leads to an increase in immune system chemicals called cytokines. This raises overall inflammation.

Inflammation increases your risk of developing chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, mental degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, insulin resistance and diabetes.

Stress hormones affect immune cells in a variety of ways. Immune cells help prepare to fight invaders and heal after injury.

Stress prioritizes energy over immunity in order to cope with a specific situation.

Chronic stress dampens the function of immune cells. This makes you more susceptible to infections and slows the rate at which you can heal.

Stress induces the inflammation that causes chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, mental degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, insulin resistance and diabetes.

Does stress shorten your lifespan?

Too much stress shortens your lifespan.

Do you want to live a long life? You will need to curb chronic stress to do so.

That's because it has even been associated with shortened telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that measure a cell's age.

Telomeres cap chromosomes to allow DNA to get copied every time that a cell divides without damaging the cell's genetic code, and they shorten with each cell division.

This is why cells can't divide and live forever. They die off as telomeres shorten. Long term stress speeds up this process.

When telomeres become too short, a cell can no longer divide and it dies.

As if that wasn't enough, chronic stress has even more ways that it can sabotage your health. This includes acne, hair loss, sexual dysfunction, headaches, muscle tension, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, and irritability.

Too much stress speeds up cellular aging.

Your life will always be filled with stressful situations.

What matters to your brain and entire body is how you respond to that stress.

If you can view these situations as challenges that you can control and master, rather than threats that are insurmountable, you will perform better in the short run and stay healthy in the long run.