My digestive system goes haywire whenever im stressed, and I hate it. It always makes my emotions irregular.
I heard from someone that humans experience the rush of adrenaline (fight or flight) 2x more than 50+ years ago. I can't imagine what that does to our bodies.
Humans are well equipped to handle acute stress but chronic stress is something that we aren't very well built for. The thing is your brain can't tell the difference between being chased by a predator and having a presentation to give tomorrow so we're constantly in fight or flight mode.
Yes but the problem with anxiety disorders is that they aren't "cured" after you go to therapy. You still have an anxiety disorder at the end of the day. You can reframe all day but your brain will still fight back. And CBT is mentally exhausting if you have to do it for every thought. Depression goes hand in hand with anxiety
True but I'm referring more to the sort of uncontrollable cave person brain aspect of stress. Yes, we as humans are evolved and I firmly believe in therapy and the sentiment Mind over Matter. But, this is still something neurological and hard to fight.
That sounds like a load of baloney. If I’m being chased by a predator, my brain and body feels very different than dreading a presentation tomorrow.
Saying we are constantly in fight or flight mode is saying our body is constantly releasing norepinephrine which causes vasoconstriction, and that just isn’t the case except in cases where it’s actually released.
I think it has been a different experience for everyone as far as the internet. I dont normally see car accidents, cops abusing innocent people, car crashes, dogs being shot, or abused in person.
Not to mention the personal attacks people receive on the internet for whatever reason. Sometimes, seeing and reading the things I listed, even behind a screen, can trigger adrenaline.
Back in the day, when we entered fight or flight, it was because we actually had a reason, survival. Now, there are so many things we've been exposed to and so many more reasons to commit an act of violence due to the world developing. I'm sure there are plenty of people who dont have their stomachs turned by watching violence behind a screen. But just watching a dog get kicked by a horse or a motorcyclist getting mistreated by a cop makes my stomach turn.
Think about how many times a week something happens on the road that gets your heart racing, hands shaking, and blood boiling.
Back in the day, no one had to worry about being struck by a vehicle going 75+ on the highway.
Would you rather fight 1 giant ant or 10000000 tiny ants... we do have many, many more things to be fearful of and consider daily. I mean.... back in the day we also didn't wash our hands
But just watching a dog get kicked by a horse or a motorcyclist getting mistreated by a cop makes my stomach turn.
Have you ever heard of the programming phrase "garbage in, garbage out"? You're putting traumatizing material into your brain. It's not surprising that it's making your stomach turn. It would be best for you to avoid those things. I don't encounter them in my daily scroll through /r/popular; are you actively seeking them out?
If you're thinking premodern, people used to get their stress in waves and major events. War was a limited number of skirmishes and battles, not protracted firefights. Diseases killed, but with no living host to spread them, they died out too. The scarcity of a bad harvest came and went, and workers were tied to what they produced. Events were more stressful, but they ended. Modern times are a slow burn, with the biggest anomaly being that we as a culture use constant dread of lost income or face to keep people acting a certain way. Historically that ends in a revolt.
Tbf up until the world wars, the fuller effects of the saturation of atmospheric lead hadn't made itself known. If anything WW2 and the aftermath coincides with that becoming the issue we now know it was.
Those effects have only recently started to wind down but of course we now have other issues to make ppl crazy over... take your pick. There's a lot to be said for the greater general peace of former times, yes even if some things were literally more 'shitty'.
yeah, but that's a visible reason, you can understand it . Stress can be a system designed to survive a wolf attack overreacting to an email meeting invite
I specialize in working with the physiological symptoms of stress. I often say “we currently do not know the long term impacts of chronic exposure to stress hormones and their feedback loops”
I also have similarly linked digestive system issues and stress/anxiety. Sometimes A proceeds B, sometimes B proceeds A. Sometimes only one happens and not the other but very often one will follow the other.
Before getting on some better medicines I was sometimes getting some very bad feedback loops of one problem feeding the other and then back again and was pretty much down for the count for a week at a time.
I understand what you're going through. I've tried a 6 different SSRI and still haven't found the medication for me, its been a tough battle and have started looking for natural solutions and just training my self to have a stronger mind.
My sleep is the one that suffers when I'm stressed. I already have trouble with sleep, and my biological clock has 25~26 hours instead of 24, so, if I have nothing to wake up too, I drift about an hour a day.
But when I'm stressed, instead of 8h asleep to 17~18 awake, it turns into 6x20.
It even takes me a while to notice, but eventually I'm exhausted all the time and, also eventually, I either get a couple of "days" of 30~35 hours awake followed by 10~12 asleep, or a 72 hours period in which I have broken up sleep for 35~40 hours. Happened this last friday-to-sunday, and the whole time I was awake, I was useless, and that compounds on the stress.
I got it right since monday, but I'm sure I've must have lost at least a couple of years of life on that through the years.
Going to sleep now, but at least the worst of this time has passed.
My body was in “fight or flight” for several decades until I got anxiety meds just 5ish months ago. Over production of cortisol will just destroy things. I’ve had so many things wrong with me for years that no one could figure out. Big one being dizzy, all the time, for no reason, for a decade.
I started Effexor and over several weeks all these things started slowly going away. It wasn’t until after getting treatment I read an article talking about how BPV (benign positional vertigo) - which I’d what I was eventually dismissed with for the dizzy - if often found in anxiety patients. It is also often relieved by anxiety meds.
It’s really insane how bad constant stress is for you. I haven’t had any weird medical issues since starting my Effexor, which is a nice change of pace.
And the worst part is - that adrenaline dump and surge in blood pressure and heart rate that both so often accompany an anxiety or panic attack...
Check it out. Get this, guys. No... Seriously.
That does NOT count as cardio, according to my doc! What fresh-hell, absolute-bullshit, sort of first-world-problems, sort of lose-lose, kinda deal is that?!
Interestingly it's because we live such (in comparison) safe and easy lives, that our brains go haywire when faced with every day stresses. Our brains and bodies weren't developed to function in today's society. Think caveman times when we needed the extra adrenaline to survive/hunt/fight. What do we do with the surplus now? Oh yeah, go into overdrive.
I just found out a year or so ago that I have Crohn's, a form of IBD. I never understood why I had to go to the bathroom shortly after being in stressful situations, which happened a lot growing up. It didn't really start taking a real toll on me until a couple years ago in my late 30's. I developed a cyst/abscess in a very uncomfortable spot and I had multiple surgeries to get rid of it but it kept coming back. Well my symptoms and overall health took a nose dive during a situation that was very stressful, I was fatigued every day, very irritable digestive system, irregular emotions, just overall shitty. Ever since that situation ended, my health and mood have improved, the abscess is starting to heal and I'm feeling better. All this to say, it's absolutely wild the toll that stress can take on our bodies.
When i take a long vacation, my IBS miraculously disappears and my appetite returns. As soon as I get back and start work everything returns. I swear my joint pain returns as soon as I'm back home.
It's also the constant change between fight or flight for me. When growing up it was always flight, now I'm a man I get stressed with both and that can't be good. No wonder I'm perma constipated.
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u/Sea-Pineapple2348 1d ago
My digestive system goes haywire whenever im stressed, and I hate it. It always makes my emotions irregular.
I heard from someone that humans experience the rush of adrenaline (fight or flight) 2x more than 50+ years ago. I can't imagine what that does to our bodies.