What is stress?
In evolutionary terms, stress, or the stress response as it is also known, is one of the body's alarm systems designed to ensure the survival of the organism when it is threatened. It is therefore a term for the body's own physical reactions to the strains and demands we face.
The stress response occurs automatically in order to activate all our resources when exposed to stress or a threat - or, as is often the case, just the thought of a threat.
The stress response enables the body to fight, flight, or freeze. Biologically, the body increases the production of the hormones called adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol, which means, among other things, that blood will rush to the muscles, sweat production increases, breathing intensifies, blood pressure rises, digestion slows down, and attention and senses will sharpen.
This means that we hear, smell, and feel more intensely. In evolutionary terms, it is very useful to have heightened senses. If you were living in a cave on the savannah and lions were nearby, it would be useful to only sleep lightly and have sharpened hearing in order to be able to wake up very quickly and either fight or flee if it got dangerous.
However, in modern society, we do not experience these kinds of threats anymore, but because this part of the brain and the stress response are very old, it cannot distinguish between, for example, the pressure we feel because of an overload of tasks or an urgent deadline at work or a lion threatening us on the savannah. The brain cannot distinguish between an imagined or an actual threat and therefore it triggers the same response.
