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During the stress response, long-term costly building projects throughout the body such as growth, tissue repair, reproduction and digestion are scaled back. Pain perception is blunted, the body gets better at clotting wounds, the immune system activates, and the brain focuses and processes information more acutely. This is all highly adaptive but takes a huge amount out of the body. The stress response puts the body’s system into overdrive, it only cares about getting you out of immediate danger. It is an amazing system, but extremely costly to our bodies. Used to get us out of immediate danger it is incredible, used repetitively over the long term it can have serious impacts on our bodily health.


As humans have developed high levels of intelligence, so we have developed the ability to activate the stress response by just thinking about something stressful i.e. worry. We have developed an anticipatory stress response. This is great if it is justified, but if there is no actual physical stressors impending and if we do it regularly (because of mental illness or chronic stress in our lives) we can have a problem.


Is Stress Good or Bad? - The answer is as always, it depends! Short term stress is necessary for escaping a charging lion or if you want to make any gains in fitness training for example. However, chronic (long term) stress in an over-trained runner or someone who is just completely burned out at their job is not good.


The brain is the central command for the stress response. It receives, evaluates, and responds to stress in our environment from all sources. It is very important to understand that stress is everything the brain perceives as stress. If your brain perceives something as stress, then it will trigger the response, good or bad. This is especially pertinent in modern society.


The Stress Cup and Exercise – The Search for Allostatic Load. The stress cup is an excellent representation of good stress ‘allostatic load’ that we often use when developing training plans. The important message here is that stress is cumulative, i.e. the body doesn’t care where the stress comes from whether it be exercise, relationship, environmental or emotional stress, it all adds up together.


In the example below, the left cup is representative of most people, it is full but there is a little space left at the top to add in exercise. If you can stay within your stress cup without overflowing it, you can achieve


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a positive adaptation to your development, this is known as ‘allostatic load’ (the middle cup).


Once you hit a plateau you will need to add more stress to create an adaption. In order to have capacity for your extra stress you need to reduce stress from other areas such as improving the quality of sleep, nutrition and reducing other life stresses (as seen in the right cup).


Everyone’s capacity for stress is different, this can be based on genetic, environmental, social and psychological reasons. Due to this some people will be more vulnerable and some more resilient. Development should be individualised taking into consideration the physical, emotional and psychological state and history of the individual. With gentle graded exposure to allostatic stress, it is possible to increase a person’s capacity (cup size) over the long term. It is essential however, that this is done gradually via expansion of the comfort zone until the comfort zone envelops the original fear zone. Erratic overload can cause a huge stress response as the body and brain attempt to adapt. If that happens over and over, it can lead to injury, under performance, maladaptation, burnout and eventually disease.


As Paracelus (16th century founder of toxicology) stated: ‘Poison is in everything, and nothing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy’.


As coaches and managers are dealers in stress, getting the balance right and leading to positive adaptation, for example, is getting the most out of our athletes and staff. We are always striving for the ‘hormetic window’.


What Can I do if I feel Stressed? Stress is a fact of modern life, but it is not


all bad and can even be positive. If you are currently feeling stressed, speaking to a professional and identifying what the stressors are and how to deal with them can be an important first step.


We can also try to mitigate the effects of modern living by making a few small adjustments to lifestyle. Research tells us that one way of managing stress is a


healthy lifestyle. Smoking, being overweight, not sleeping, not getting enough exercise, and drinking too much all fill up the stress cup and have the potential to create disease.


Exercise also helps in all sorts of ways. It decreases our chances of cardiovascular disease, and that seems to protect against certain aspects of brain ageing and cognitive decline. Exercise also stimulates our neurons helping to grow new processes and new connections.


Another thing the research shows is that long-lasting loving relationships, social connectivity and social support are essential.


It is important to realise that you cannot save your stress management for the weekend; it must be done daily. You must make time for stress management such as talking, exercising, meditation, organising your day, making your sleep environment better, learning to say NO or increasing time with loved ones.


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