The science of stress - how your body's chemical response to anger affects your health

It's no secret that anger is bad for you. It can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, and even stroke. But now it's time to take a closer look at what happens inside your body.

The word "stress" has a lot of meanings in the English language, but am not talking about work-related stress or exam induced anxiety here. Am talking about the fight or flight response, otherwise known as the acute psychophysiological response syndrome (APR). Usually triggered by an event that threatens our well-being, this response is designed to help us either defend ourselves against danger or run away from it as fast as possible: adrenaline and cortisol are released into circulation while breathing becomes more rapid and blood pressure rises.

In life-threatening situations, this response is great which can even save your life or someone else's. But these days, modern living means many of us live under constant threat of danger from traffic and other hazards designed to kill people like bombs, gunshots, or knives.

While our bodies are perfectly primed for flight responses when necessary, having the same response over and over again has consequences like you become more likely to suffer from stress-related illnesses such as depression, high blood pressure, or heart disease.

For years now we have known that stress can also affect gut health. Many types of bacteria grow in a particular way based on a few factors such as what you eat, where you live, and your lifestyle.

However, when stress is added to the mix things can change very quickly. Stress can affect the body in numerous ways, prompting high blood pressure or heart disease for instance but when it affects the gut, it changes how bacteria grow and this has consequences for our health too because we know that 70% of our immune system is found in our guts.

Stress appears to have effects on hormones including corticotrophin-releasing hormone also known has(CRH), cortisol, oxytocin, and vasopressin which makes sense given these are all part of APR. In particular, CRH seems to be central: its receptors reduce anxiety in animals. It also triggers the release of cortisol from the adrenal glands, which in turn stimulates the release of glucose and raises blood pressure.

If there had been no fight or flight response, glucocorticoid would activate genes that reduce inflammation. But with their action blocked, inflammatory markers remain high. And chronic inflammation can lead to serious health issues such as cancer and autoimmune disease.

There's a lot of research on the effects of stress on immunity, and one marker of poor immune function is a lower level of white blood cells called neutrophils.

A study found that people suffering from depression had fewer white blood cells.

This suggests that high hostility may be linked with reduced immunity, which could in turn mean that some people are less able to fight off infections.

Because they can't handle stress as well as others, they are also more likely to suffer from issues such as depression and anxiety, due to the stress hormone cortisol.

People who are high in hostility tend to be more reactive when they have a stressor. This means that if you don't handle stress well (especially when your resources have been depleted) such as being at risk of losing your job or having financial worries, then you may see this leading onto other problems with mood because hostility has been linked with poor sleep quality which is often an indication of mental health issues like depression.

This kind of lifestyle can lead people into what's called 'allostatic load' where you're constantly putting yourself under physical strain without enough time for recovery.

In this situation, your body isn't able to replenish the resources it has lost and over time you may see exhaustion of immune cells which increases inflammation.

This is where stress can also lead onto other health problems such as digestive issues.

It's not just psychological conditions like depression that are related with gut health: a study in animals found that stress-induced gut dysfunction could be linked with autism.

What about chronic pain? Well, chronic pain is often caused by ongoing inflammation (less white blood cells) but we can also see similar reactions in muscles, so if you're under continuous and you don't feel well-rested or relaxed even when you've had enough sleep.

This means that when you have a high level of cortisol, it can also interfere with areas of the body, such as the digestive tract and your musculoskeletal system.

For instance, problems with digestion may be linked to high levels of cortisol which means your stomach acid is in overdrive and you're not digesting food properly. This may lead onto other health issues like IBS or leaky gut syndrome.

So in short stress isn't good for you. The fight or flight response places a huge strain on our body and we need to be aware of how best to manage this in order to reduce the impact it can have on us.

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