Half of ALL doctors’ appointments are stress related.
According to NHS Digital, 312m doctors’ appointments were made in England alone in 2019.
So that’s 156m doctors’ appointments that were potentially stress related.
Scary thought huh?
It is a widely accepted fact across the therapy world, that your body speaks your mind and dis-ease causes disease.
When your body is feeling stressed it will go into its emergency programme mode to protect you, so your fight or flight mode kicks in and creates a hormone called cortisol.
Cortisol then hurtles through your body, speeding up your heart rate and increasing adrenaline so the blood pumps round faster.
Why does it do that?
In short, if your fight or flight is activated your brain; whose number one job it is, is to keep you safe, thinks you could die, and it definitely doesn’t want THAT to happen.
So it produces adrenaline to speed up your mind and body and help you to either fight or take flight and therefore deal with the danger.
Trouble is It doesn’t understand the difference between real and imagined ‘threat’ so it will do its UTMOST to do what it can to keep you alive; whatever the THING you are stressed or anxious about is.
Now your body is a self-healing machine so if you have an illness or injury your body will react and try it’s best to get you better as quickly as possible.
BUT if you are stressed your body thinks it’s already doing its number one job of stopping your from dying and so all it’s time and energy will be focussed on that.
So the other job of reacting to possible illness or injury has to take second place to be dealt with once the ‘threat’ is over.
If you are constantly stressed this process can happen 100’s or 1,000’s of times a day and so it is easy to see how disease can creep in while the brain is distracted.
So as much as you can, keep your stress and therefore anxiety down and give your body a fighting chance at keeping all the other nasty stuff at bay too.
