Effects of stress on energy and metabolism

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Stress, which has become so familiar to a modern person, can have a detrimental effect not only on mood, but also on health. Often times, health or weight problems are a reflection of our inability to deal with stress properly.

Each person's life has its own stressful situations, but we all react to them in the same way. Here's what to know about stress:

1. Sometimes, in a stressful situation, adrenaline boils inside, and when everything is over, the body remains like a squeezed lemon. Stress depletes the adrenal glands, which produce the hormone cortisol, so that we feel energized in difficult situations. But if the stress lasts longer, hormones are not enough and a feeling of emptiness arises.

Learning to manage stress can help you lose weight and improve your health.

2. Let's face it: stress never ends. As soon as we solve one problem, another immediately appears. Therefore, the secret to a happy life is not stress avoidance, but the ability to work it out. Nowadays, trainings and classes on managing stress in life are popular all over the world. Ideally, you should avoid communicating with unpleasant people and avoid unpleasant situations, but in real life this is not so easy. Therefore, it is worth learning how to switch from irritation to positive emotions, relax and enjoy life.

3. Learning to manage stress will help you lose weight and improve your health. You can go on diets for years without much result, or you can look at the root of the problem and eliminate the root cause of obesity. Overeating is often caused by things that seem unrelated to food, such as stressful relationships, sleep problems, lifestyle choices, or problems at work. Knowing that happiness begins outside the comfort zone, you just need to start working with problems, and not seize them.

Now let's see how stress affects us.

Thyroid

When stressed, the thyroid gland slows down the metabolism, which leads to weight gain. Therefore, before taking medications for your "slow" metabolism, try to eliminate stress.

Neurotransmitters

For a quick recharge, we enjoy sweet and junk food.

When we are under stress, the cells in our body are in dire need of two substances: serotonin and dopamine. Serotonin is responsible for feelings of peace and safety, while dopamine signals reward and pleasure. For a quick recharge, we enjoy sweet and junk food, which inevitably spoils the figure.

Cortisol

We are literally drowning in this stress hormone. But cortisol ensures the preservation of fatty deposits, especially in the abdomen.

Soothing food

Under stress, we seek comfort in food. It is bad that modern people rarely distinguish between the desire to eat and the desire to enjoy and calm down. Needless to say, such food is usually far from healthy.

Self-medication

We often use food as a drug to distract ourselves from problems. As with any addiction, it is very difficult to quit, but you still need to face the truth and acknowledge your addiction.