Fast Forward to Modern-Day Stress
Stress doesn’t last for thirty minutes anymore. It’s not even an hour.For many of you, the experience can last eight/ten/twelve/eighteen(!!) hours a day:
- Hitting deadlines for Greg
- Getting chewed out by Karen
- All while sustaining, and hopefully building on, the life you want
These situations don’t put you into a heightened level of fight-or-flight, but it’s still enough to elicit a reaction. The kind of reaction that raises your heart rate or fires shots of adrenaline into your bloodstream. The kind of reaction that shuts down the activation of your immune system because who needs it, right? If we’re stressed, our body will continue to work in the same way it’s supposed to. It doesn’t consider whether or not we’re in a life-or-death situation, just that we’re stressed; it’s acting accordingly.
As a result, you won’t feel sick.
You read that correctly.
Your immune system works in a way where the best defense is a good offense. We’re coming into contact with things that could make us sick all the time, but our immune system is on it! Sometimes it’s fighting and we don’t even realize it. However, the symptoms you experience (fevers, for example) during a flu or cold won’t always appear during times of stress. Why should they? Your body is too busy to respond to the daily exposure of viruses and bacteria.
You’ve now made yourself vulnerable and you don’t even realize it.