More on Stress and Chronic Disease

Hello bOObs Bloggettes:

I’ve briefly touched upon how long-term stress is really bad for the body and your health, but let’s look at this in more detail as it’s oh-so important.

I think most doctors would agree that taking as much stress as possible out of your life would be a really sound goal for all of us. They probably know this both from personal experience but also from understanding the physiological effect stress has on the body and how it can affect your health. Case in point:

PERSONAL STORY: Twenty years ago, I was super stressed out. I was working 70 to 80 hours a week as a renewable energy lobbyist on Capitol Hill and wrapping up my thesis for my Masters degree (how I did all this, I’ll never know). I had one pain-in-the-rear client who I really wanted to fire, but for various reasons I felt I couldn’t/shouldn’t. I remember thinking to myself, “I can handle this stress for one more year, then I’m retiring from this business.”

Well, my body shouted back, “To heck with that, girlfriend, you’re going to retire right now!” Right around that time my husband and I had about five back-to-back deaths in our family, some in the immediate family tree. It was a lot of grief to take on. Then, the final straw was 9-11. My body soon gave out and I came down with a neurological condition. Because the array of doctors I went to couldn’t diagnose it correctly for 1.5 years, it became chronic. (Argh. Another story for another time.) I have since thankfully backed it down to almost nothing now using (once again) alternative methods and finding docs to help me who think outside the box.

But my point is this: Stress is not a good thing!  Especially if you already have a chronic disease or you if want to avoid one in the future, such as cancer.

You probably heard about the woman who swears she reversed her breast cancer by watching only hilarious videos day in and day out? It was all over the news and she even wrote a book about it.  She was essentially de-stressing her body. (In fact, there are now tons of books written by women with cancer now swearing laughter helped them tremendously.)

And the government is even running clinical trials to research if laughter helps reduce stress, depression, and anxiety in breast cancer patients — and it happily does!  Read this for more info: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4439472/

Watching all the COVID news for two years and then going right into a war, don’t you just feel your body saying, “Ahhh! Stop watching TV!!” Most of my friends have cut way back, as have I. Not that we don’t care anymore, but rather it’s a type of self-preservation. I think intuitively we know that this much back-to-back stress is not going to bode well on our health and the need has finally arisen to detach from it the best we can.

But back to what stress does to the body. It was explained to me by Dr. Gloria Jackson (she’s one of the M.D.s in my film). Dr. Gloria said that when the body is stressed, it releases the hormone cortisol. For a short period of time this is fine, as that’s what puts us into the Fight or Flight mode and makes such things as our adrenal glands start pumping out adrenaline (also a hormone) to help us out of whatever terrible situation we are in (e.g., a tiger chasing us up a tree).

However, when you sustain high cortisol levels over a longer period of time, your body can’t take all that constant Fight or Flight mode. Because it’s not just adrenaline that’s being elevated, it’s also the cascading effect on all the other hormones in the body that affect all the various bodily systems and functions, including: nervous, immune, cardiovascular, respiratory, reproductive, musculoskeletal, and integumentary. All of them.

Cortisol has a “positive” or a “negative” feedback loop on the release of these various hormones, keeping you in an upward release spiral or a downward one, respectively.  But you don’t want your body in a continual mode of high cortisol levels for long periods of time or it throws everything off, and your body eventually may want to shut down with something acute (as it did in my case) and/or you run a high risk of getting a chronic condition (which I also encountered).

My three dear girlfriends that I wrote about in my last blog that I lost to cancer were all Type A personalities (like me) and seemed to always be burning the candle at both ends. While they did achieve much in life operating this way (as did I) and were very successful in their endeavors, most of us can’t function that way perpetually and we develop things such as cancer. I still wonder if their striving for perfection and over-achievement in many aspects of their lives helped to incite their cancers. I know this is what happened in my case and I’ve learned through the years to be less critical of myself now — some things just have to slide! as my sister-in-law used to tell me after I fell ill.

BOOBS BOTTOM LINE: I will talk about the “breast cancer persona” that has been researched by medicine in another blog, but today I just wanted to toss out this de-stress thing as fodder for your thoughts. With all the stress coming at us right now, we need to lighten up as much as possible and as often as possible. Hard to do, I know, but necessary for the well-being of ourselves and the relationships with our loved ones around us. Watch funny shows and films and read funny books, I say! And hang out with friends who love to laugh — just like Mary Poppins:)

Blog at you soon, thanks for reading and helping to spread the word!  (Please see the “share” links below.)  And we’d love to hear comments from you! (see below as well)

Stay healthy,

Megan

Megan Smith, M.S.
Director, bOObs: The War on Women’s Breasts

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