Creating a Healthy Lifestyle

Everyone has stress now and then.  Life is filled with challenges and changes, and we need to cope with them on a daily basis.  For instance, there is always stress at home.  Your spouse may have different needs or expectations, and you need to respond to them.  If you have children, they have needs and wants that you will have to respond to every day.  Your job or career will give you problems and challenges that you need to resolve.  In short, every day there is normal stress that we must confront and resolve.

There is, however, chronic stress that doesn’t go away.  Even when you don’t have a particular problem, just thinking about a problem brings on a stressful response. When you have a problem that can be easily solved, you may still have thoughts about it that doesn’t go away so easily.  You may have worries or thoughts about the past or future but can’t do anything about them.  All of these worrisome thoughts cause chronic stress.

Chronic stress causes your brain, the part in the lower part of the temporal lobe ( the hypothalamus)  to stimulate the pituitary gland to produce a stress hormone (ACTH) that in turn stimulates the adrenal glands above the kidneys to make the stress hormones, cortisol and epinephrine.  In chronic stress, these hormones can block arteries in the brain and cause a stroke, or block arteries going to the heart and causing a heart attack.  Every one has normal stress during the course of life, but when stress becomes chronic (bad stress) it can do damage to our brain and heart.  It can be fatal.

In my book, Create a Healthy Lifestyle, I discuss how you can discover the “secrets” of health and happiness.  The good news is: We can prevent chronic stress from wrecking havoc on our health.