NokiaBetaLabs

Stress - Flee or fight!

Written by Johanna, Nokia Wellness Diary Team

I’ve started to use the De-stress monitor in Wellness Diary and noticed that I’ve been a bit stressed as my stress-recovery level has been low. This made me wonder how stress affects my wellbeing.    Medicinet website explains that stress is related to external forces (stressors) that create stress and our internal ability of responding to it. Thus, stress is anything that poses a challenge to our wellbeing.  Our responses to it enable us to improve our performance when needed.

Our bodies and minds respond to stress in many ways to help us cope:

• stress hormones are released (e.g.  adrenaline and cortisol)
• alertness rises, making it difficult to sleep
• immune and digestive systems slow down
• attention is focused
• heart rate and blood pressure increase
• glucose is released to give us energy to take action

Stress has been a key to our survival as species as these responses help us to flee or fight. This is supposed to be a short-term reaction to a certain situation, but what happens if stress and our responses to it become long-term?

In the modern world, stress has become a constant companion for many. Long-term stress has far-reaching consequences on our physical and mental health: it can lead to depression, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancers, migraine, and digestive diseases to name a few.  It also makes us even more responsive to stress, leading to a vicious cycle!

Long-term stress creates these problems as our bodies and minds don’t have the chance to recover and the stress responses are always in. So, chronic stress is harmful but what can we do to overcome it? American institute of Stress points out that the best way to reduce stress is to prevent it altogether by removing the stressors from our lives. For some of us this seems quite impossible, so here are a few other tricks one could try:

• exercise: Medicinet  says  that exercise helps turn down the production of stress hormones and neurochemicals
• relax and sleep: different relaxation techniques (e.g.  meditation) and adequate sleep make it easier to recover from stress and cope with it
• avoid alcohol: excessive alcohol consumption heightens the stress responses, meaning small stress can create big surges of stress hormones

The purpose of the De-stress monitor in Wellness Diary is to measure how well you have recovered from stress.  You can do this by assessing how well you feel you have recovered from stress any given day on a scale of 1 to 5. By monitoring your stress recovery level you can see when it is time to slow down. As healthy eating, adequate sleep and exercising are vital in combatting stress, monitoring them and setting targets can also help you.

How do you combat stress? Have you found Wellness Diary useful in this sense?

- Johanna