What is Stress? When we sit down and ponder on this six alphabet word we can think of doing almost everything on a daily basis can add up to as stress. What’s stressful in life? Every individual has a different definition of stress it can be from doing daily household chores, encounter with an animal, environmental stress, to work stress. Stress in simple words can be narrated as body’s reaction towards any demand or threat and how our body perceives and processes it at a cellular level.
Perhaps, we do need a little bit of stress to keep our mind alert and is essential for survival. The “fight-or-flight” mechanism can tell us when and how to respond to danger. However, if this mechanism is triggered too easily, or when there are too many stressor’s at one time, the person can be overloaded and can struggle to cope.
Factors contributing to stress:
An individual can undergo through a swirl of stressor’s throughout his life span but this are some of the major contributing factors towards our day to day stress:-
– Physical Stress – Over exercising, strenuous jobs involving lifting heavy articles, smoking, alcohol consumption, accidents and trauma
– Emotional/Mental Stress – loss of some one beloved in the family, relationship ,work
– Financial Stress – loss of job, retirement
– Environmental Stress – Pollution present in the atmosphere can adversely effect our health due to emission of carbon di – oxide from vehicles, factories emitted chemicals during the production process, households cleaning products contain a lot of chemicals.
All, this can over burden our immune system and show signs and symptoms and take toll on our body eventually.
Effects of stress on digestion
Our body’s are not designed to manage both stress and digestion together. When we are stressed are body is in a state of shock and our brain perceives this message very quickly and all the blood pumps to the vital organs and their is no digestion taking place in the gut. Thus, we undergo through a lot of signs and symptoms like bloated, constipated, bad fermentation occurs in the gut all this can lead to dysbiosis in the gut.
Impact, of stress on digestion is devastating if it prolongs for a longer duration it can be detrimental to our over all health. The brain -gut connection is very vital in fact our gut is considered as the ‘second brain’. Due, to stress there are alterations in brain-gut interactions this can lead to a wide spectrum of gastrointestinal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disorder, GERD, peptic ulcer.
Preventive measures can be executed to avoid such dysbiosis in the gut:
Practice mindful and conscious Eating
- Chew your food well
- Destress by praying or by taking deep breaths
- Do not have any distractions while eating such as talking to someone, watching television, reading books.
- Do not eat while in a rush
- Go for lighter meals such a soups and broths when body is stressed.
- Use small cutlery to put in small portions of food at each time.
- Smell and see your food as we activate our senses and also ignite our digestive juices.
- Enjoy each and every flavour, texture and taste of food.