“Everything around me is in flames. It’s just stress and more stress, and nothing I do seems to make a difference,” a patient told me. “I feel I’m on a hamster wheel.
I run and run, but I can never get anywhere. So, I run faster. There’s no point to it, but I don’t know what else there is to do.
” Stress is hard to avoid. We find ourselves facing constant deadlines and never-ending demands at work and home – which push us to be hyperalert – and feeling that we are stuck in a situation that will never improve. Worse yet, we worry that if we stop swimming, we’ll sink.
To complicate things more, we are bombarded by troubling information about the world, feeding into our insecurities and anxieties and making it harder to relax our minds. Stress can affect us on multiple levels – physically and mentally – particularly if it becomes the norm for long periods of time. But we can take some steps to ease stress in our lives and feel better.
When we are stressed, it affects how we think and behave. Credit: Getty Images How stress affects our body, brain and thinking Biologically, strain and adversity can lead to excessive stress hormone release, potentially resulting in increased inflammatory markers in the blood. This suggests that the body is in reaction mode, attuned to something in the environment that is potentially problematic and requiring heightened attention.
Stress can affect health measures, increasing chronic illness risk and cellular markers of acc.