We work too much and too long. Working with no time off has consequences. In one large study, overwork (defined, by the way, as over 45 hours every week—how much more are YOU doing?) is associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, fatigue, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, chronic infections, diabetes, and other general health complaints. Other research has found a link between chronic stress and metabolic syndrome, that dangerous cluster of conditions including inner belly fat, insulin resistance, high cholesterol and high blood pressure that increases the risk of heart disease and cancer, especially colon cancer. Mandatory overtime now costs industry as much as $300 billion a year in stress- and fatigue-related problems.
It’s also making us fat, or at least women. A British study discovered that working long hours increases women’s, but not men’s, consumption of high fat and high sugar snacks, and caffeine (and cigarettes for smokers), and decreases their exercise time. And it’s not just more work, but stress itself that’s causing these negative effects on women. Even one stressful event, like a blown deadline or important meeting, was linked for women to greater snacking on unhealthy food and fewer portions of healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables.
What’s that about? How come women, but not men, go for the Candy Calm? It’s in our hardwiring. Colleagues of mine at UCSF discovered that women produce less of the feel-good hormone serotonin than men, and high fat, high sugar foods actually drive the stress hormones down. So when women eat high sugar or high fat comfort food, they feel less stressed --at least temporarily-- until the stress over all those gobbled French fries and candy bars kicks in.
How come we’re all in such sorry shape? The collision of these present day stresses with our primal brain physiology has, for many of us, caused the "fight or flight" mechanism to be turned on most of the time. This was was supposed to help us through short-term life or death emergencies!
Everybody has some cortisol, one of the hormones in the "fight or flight" mechanism, circulating all the time. Otherwise we would be zombies. Some people have a bit more, others a bit less. Depending on your level, you are either what’s known as up-regulated or down-regulated. If you’re down regulated, you’re a Cool Cucumber. It takes a lot to get the stress response going, which is good. Your body isn’t getting as much stress wear and tear. Then there are the up-regulated people who are the Nervous Nellies and Neds, running around constantly doing things. For them, it’s a very tiny difference between being calm and going right through the ceiling. The majority of people are in between. What are you? Given the present day lifestyle, no matter where we are, unless we learn to practice Safe Stress, more and more of us will be suffering from stress health effects—poor sleep, weight gain, depression, etc.
One of the most important things to keep in mind when it comes to stress is that the mind and body are exquisitely interconnected. When you get stressed out, the hormones affect everything. The brain is specifically vulnerable. If you sectioned the areas of the brain after you had chronic elevations of cortisol day after day, week after week, what you would notice is cellular death, which affects everything from your mood to your ability to feel and sense.
Chronic elevations of cortisol are toxic to every single tissue in the human body. They lead to Toxic Stress, which increases your appetite for refined sugars and fat. The result is you pile on more pounds, especially deep in the abdomen. This bumps up your blood pressure and cholesterol. Here are a few of the dangerous effects: higher “bad” cholesterol and lower “good” cholesterol, fatigue, ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, low sex drive, memory impairment, inability to concentrate or think creatively, hardening of the arteries, and lack of quality and quantity of sleep.
In my book "Fight Fat After Forty: The Stress-Fat Connection", I describe cortisol’s role in refueling appetite, thereby causing stress overeating and abdominal weight gain, which I labeled "Toxic Weight," because it is highly associated with heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Women in particular suffer from the Stressed Out-Belly connection. In response to the hunger cortisol creates, they become stress overeaters, making it a mission to go out and eat large quantities of whatever they can find. Men, on the other hand, tend to go toward alcohol under stress, which causes physical, emotional and social problems of its own.
However stress shows up, it’s never one episode that triggers these terribly negative effects. It’s the piling up of one on top of another over time. That’s why it’s so hard to say, "This one thing caused this." Extended reactions to stress are also factors in osteoporosis, inflammatory arthritis, and, by impairing the brain’s ability to block harmful molecules, Alzheimer’s disease.