We all know that stress affects our bodies in more ways than we can even begin to ponder. But sometimes it’s good to hear out why and how so we can take the necessary steps to eradicate it and if not at least try to minimize its effects in our daily lives.
Let’s face it, aging is not exactly the most exciting thing, no one wants to look old, well at least for the most part. But even when you’ve been trying different creams, or taking daily doses of collagen, one of the most, if not the most important thing we need to look at when doing different things to slow down aging.
Yup, it’s called stress. So let’s get through some essential details so you know some of the reasons stress can affect your anti-aging efforts drastically.
You can have stress in your life from a variety of sources, and it can be emotional or physical, but the impact caused by any type of stress affects your anti-aging efforts.
You’ll notice that your immune system doesn’t react the way that it should.
You might not have as much energy as you once had. Your ability to concentrate on things can become a problem, too. This happens because of stress ages the body. You might be young, but feel much older physically as a result of the toll that stress takes on your body.
Stress can cause your blood pressure to go up. It can also cause you to develop aches and pains and lose sleep. The body is being affected because of the release of hormones that happens when you get stressed.
Over time, these stress-released hormones can even affect your memory retention. But what else it does inside your body is it revs up the aging process. When you’re under stress, it can make your body much older than it actually is.
That’s because stress shortens your telomeres. Your telomeres are like caps on your chromosomes, and their job is to conserve the chromosome. They’re like gatekeepers and work to keep your chromosomes healthy and functioning properly.
Stress shortens these gatekeepers, which allows damage to occur to your chromosomes. One problem that occurs is the increasing the rate at which your body ages because the cells get shorter faster than they normally would.
This is not a little bit of aging, either. Stress can age your body years and even decades – rapidly, which shortens your lifespan. Not only does it damage your telomeres, but it ages your brain.
You can develop age-related conditions like dementia, confusion, and more all because of stress. It can affect your vision and your hearing as well, causing diminished abilities and even loss.
The reason that this happens is that when the body encounters stress, your adrenals boost the production of hormones. These hormones can cause your blood pressure to rise, which affects your vision.
When you develop pressure in the eyes, it causes blurriness and can cause eye strain and light sensitivity. It can also worsen the side effects of any current eye condition you have.
Stress affects your ears because it limits the amount of blood flow by tightening your blood vessels. When the ears have a limited amount of blood, it causes damage by hurting the auditory cells.
When stress is chronic, you can experience hearing loss. Some people who have stress may also develop tinnitus. When stress affects the eyes and ears, reducing the stress so that the cortisol and adrenaline are returned to normal, usually restores vision and hearing.
