Can stress really make you sick? (Let's talk about Psychoneuroimmunology)

Have you ever been under a lot of stress, caught a cold after working too long, and felt exhausted? At such times, we often think, "This must be because of fatigue." But did you know that there is actually a much deeper connection between the stress in your mind and the illness in your body? This science, which talks about how the things in our minds affect our bodies, is called Psycho Neuroimmunology . Although the name is a bit complicated, the story is very simple. Let's talk about it today.

The connection between your brain and your immune system

Simply put, Psychoneuroimmunology is the study of how our mind (Psycho), nervous system (Neuro), and immune system (Immunology) work together. There is an amazing network of communication between these three.

Imagine that a virus has entered your body. Your body's first defense response is to make you "sick." We call this the "sickness response." This causes you to get a fever, lose your appetite, and feel weak. This also causes stress hormones like cortisol to be produced. All of these signals are to gather all the energy it has and fight the infection.

When this fight begins, your immune cells release special chemical messengers called cytokines . These messages travel to the brain via the vagus nerve , which runs from our stomach to our brain. When the brain receives this message, it also produces cytokines, sending another signal to the immune system to "fight harder."

This relationship works both ways. If the message from the vagus nerve to the brain is not going through, the brain won't start the "sickness response." Also, animal studies have shown that if cytokines are injected directly into the brain, even without an infection, the body will start to get sick.

How does stress make you sick?

Here's the important thing. Even when you don't actually have an infection, when you're stressed, your brain thinks there's a big fight going on in your body. So, the brain starts producing those cytokines that I mentioned earlier, even without any infection.

The difference is, this doesn't start with a germ in your body, but directly in your brain due to the stress you're under.

Short-term stress doesn't cause much harm. But we're talking about chronic stress . When you're constantly stressed, your brain keeps producing cytokines. These cytokines are things that cause inflammation in the body, that is, inflammation. Having this kind of inflammation in the body all the time is very dangerous.

Effects of long-term stress

Chronic stress not only weakens your immune system, but it also opens the door to a number of other diseases.

• Asthma: When a person with asthma is under stress, their asthma is more likely to worsen and they are more likely to have an asthma attack. People who are under stress also show a higher response to skin allergy tests.
• Heart disease : If you ask people who have had a heart attack, they will say that they had major stressful events in their lives (job problems, family problems, financial problems) before the incident.
• Cancer: Research is still ongoing into whether stress helps cancer grow and spread. But one thing that seems to be happening is that stress can help cancer cells spread. Normally, our bodies have a process called anoikis that kills diseased cells and stops them from spreading. Stress hormones disrupt this protective process.

So how do you manage this stress?

From this story, you can see that stress is not just something that is in the mind, it also directly affects the body. Although we cannot completely eliminate stress from our lives, we can control and manage it. There are 4 simple ways to do this, starting with the letter A.

stress, psychoneuroimmunology, immunity, mind and body, cytokines