Posted by shalina

Stress is often seen as totally bad for us. Everybody is trying to avoid stress or reduce it in some way. However this is much too simplistic a way to view stress. Some stress is good for us. It motivates or challenges us to learn new things and grow in experience. Some stress is bad for us in terms of sapping our spirits and impacting our physical health, including our metabolism. And every person responds to stress in different ways, such that one person may thrive under a massive workload and another may buckle under it. Stress is always with us and it often depends how we respond to it when it comes to our health and metabolism. This article will examine how is metabolism affected by stress.

The stressor is the external event that causes our bodies to respond to stress. Our bodies response is to change the homeostasis that exists in the body by increasing and secreting the hormones adrenaline and cortisol. Homeostasis is defined as the normal state; all the millions of processes and actions that go on in our body everyday.

The metabolism is part of the everyday functions that go on inside the body. It is the process by which food is processed by the body from eating through to excretion of waste products. By increasing the amount of adrenaline and cortisol the body is preparing to respond to some unusual situation. This could be a stand up row with your partner, dealing with an unhappy customer or taking on a huge project at work. This response has been dubbed the fight or flight response because it gives us the energy to fight or run away from a situation and prepares the body for any injuries or potential harm.

The purpose of the fight or flight response is to respond to a finite incident that starts and ends in a short space of time. However much of the stressors that we face today, like the mountain of work in the huge new project, do not end, and could go on for years. Thus if we respond to the stressor by constantly releasing adrenaline and cortisol we are telling the body that the normal homeostasis is wrong and that the new normal state includes an excessive amount of adrenaline and cortisol.

The analogy can be made to a car engine. If you constantly run at maximum revs. and never service it, the engine eventually breaks down. The same goes for the body. In terms of the metabolism, adrenaline makes the fat cells more efficient at turning fat into energy. Adrenaline also increases the metabolism. Cortisol has the effect of increasing the amount of glucose in the blood and creating more energy.

Whilst these changes in the body’s metabolism are good for an incident where you have to expend a lot of physical energy, we rarely have to do this at work. We spend long hours sitting at a desk whilst adrenaline and cortisol build up and give us excess energy. This often causes chronic stress or stress that has no end in sight.

Chronic stress will cause cortisol to create excess glucose. This will cause excess energy that may not be used. This will eventually end up being stored as fat. Adrenaline will continue to be secreted but the body and the fat cells, in particular, will become less sensitive to it. This means that the fat cells won’t be converted to energy and thus reduced, whilst cortisol will be increasing there quantity. This means an increase in weight.

Thus stress can improve the efficiency of the metabolism. This might be seen as good, but if the stress goes on for too long the homeostasis of the body’s metabolism is changed. This can ultimately lead to eating disorders and a break down of some of the multitude of systems that combine to help metabolize food in the body.

By Adrian Whittle