Unmasking the Silent Threat: How Chronic Anxiety and Stress Can Weaken Your Immune Armor.
How does anxiety and stress affect your body negatively? Understanding anxiety is your body’s way of reacting to stress or danger by releasing a hormone that prepare you to fight or flight when you face a challenge to protect us.
For example when you visit a safari and you see an elephant coming closer to your truck, your heart will start pounding, your muscles tense up and you become more alert. This is simply an alarm in your body getting alerted and reacting to stress or danger.
When does this alert become more harmful and bring negative outcome than protecting us?
When it is overly reacting to a situation where there’s no real danger and making you scared, worried and nervous affecting your feelings, thoughts, decisions and even the health of your body.
High anxiety leads to stress. Stress in modest ways can activate your body’s system in the positive way, however chronic stress can lead to many health issues.
It can have negative impact on the innate immune response, which is responsible for fighting inflammation and immune defence against invading pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and fungi.
These negative impacts include:
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Affecting the physical barriers by changing the structure and function of skin and mucous membranes, which prevent germs from entering the body.
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Reducing Natural Killer (NK) cell activities which identify and destroy virus-infected and abnormal cells such as cancer cells.
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Change the function and behaviour of white blood cells leading them to be less efficient at recognizing and destroying germs as an initial defence to protect the body.
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Disrupt the function of inflammatory response which allows the body to release the signalling molecules and dilate the blood vessels, so that the immune cells can reach the site of infection more quickly.
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Interfere with the complement system which is a group of proteins in the blood that not only kills the pathogens, “germs”, directly but also promote the white blood cells to fight better and boost the function of inflammatory response.
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Can lower the amount of antimicrobial peptides which are small proteins produced by our body to kill or stop the growth of bacteria and other microorganisms.
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Lower the body’s fever response to infection, where fever is our body’s way to increase in temperature to enhance the immune response and help fight pathogens.
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Finally causes imbalance to the microorganism in the digestive tack in the gut, where most of the immune system can be found and when the gut is not well, nothing can be well.
In Summary,
The innate immune system helps activate the adaptive immune system which takes the next step to target and treat the problem more specifically in your body to protect and keep overall health. Just like when we let water seep through the ceiling thinking it’s just a bit of water dropping, can lead to the collapse of the whole ceiling without a sign, it’s important to pay attention to smaller health issues which are caused by chronic stressors. It is equally important to know, not everyone will end up having health issues even if they are faced with the same stressors, as they are individually defined by their genetics, lifestyle and overall health.
