Worry, Anxiety or Stress – Look to what you are doing to your Body!Posted by j2wu on February 22nd, 2010
My heart is to set the captives free from the snares of the enemy!
1 Corinthians 10:5 says “5Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;”
Did you know that the emotional and physical responses you have to stress are set in motion by a series of chemical releases and reactions? Find out what is really going on inside your body and inside your brain and why stress is bad to the body, soul and spirit.
When you are in long-term stress or worry at work, home, etc., this is what happens. Let’s look at the body:
Adrenal gland mounted atop kidneys have just released chemical cortisol weapons of brain destruction.
Cortisol is called the death hormone. It is released to give a person supernational strength to get out of danger. Then, when the danger has passed, launched immediate counter-calm hormones before hippocampus is hammered by cortisol.”the chemical, Cortisol stops secreting and you go back to peace.
God made us to stay at homeostatis. So immediate a hormones rush to your adrenal glands to suppress the streaming cortisol on its way to your brain. Other hormones rush to your brain to round up all the remnants of cortisol that made it to your hippocampus.
After a perceived danger has passed, God made your body to balance itself and go back to homeostatis. Although the hyperactivating sympathetic nervous system jumps into action immediately, it is very slow to shut down and allow the tranquilizing parasympathetic nervous system to calm things down.
In other words in response to stress, the brain’s hypothalamus secretes a hormone that causes the pituitary gland to secrete another hormone that causes the adrenals to secrete cortisol. When levels of cortisol rise to a certain level, several areas of the brain – especially the hippocampus – tell the hypothalamus to turn off the cortisol-producing mechanism. This is the proper feedback response.
Some people have lived in extreme fear all their lives.
- How many of you grew up with one of your parents, not knowing what would set them off, lived walking on eggs?
- How many of you have had traumatic events (car wrecks, loss of jobs, etc. causing devastations or sudden loss of loved ones that brought shock like numbness?
- How many of you have been severely hurt by someone you trusted to love you and abused you instead either verbally, spiritually or physically resulting a broke heart? Result, you have a hard time trusting people.
- How many of you live in fear of rejection of others a result growing up not feeling loved or fitting in.
- Lived in war or been in war times.
- Traumatic events such as lived through tornadoes, earth quakes, etc.
- Traumatic birth
- Emergency surgery
Guess what, you’ve been programmed by a spirit of fear! Your body does not know how to get back to peace. Once your stress response has been activated, the system wisely keeps you in a state of readiness – fight to flight.
Excessive cortisol can make it difficult to think or retrieve long-term memories. That’s why people get befuddled and confused in a severe crisis. Their mind goes blank because “the lines are down.”
If either the one of the stimulating or tranquilizing chemical forces dominates (the spirit of fear) or what I call fight to flight responses because you’ve been programmed to be ready, then you will experience an on-going state of internal imbalance. This condition is known as stress. And it can have serious consequences for your brain cells.
Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Nervous System
The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) turns on the fight or flight response. In contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) promotes the relaxation response.
The strongmen (the spirit of fear known as stress or worry) are hormones, the chemical messengers produced by endocrine glands. Named after a Greek word meaning “to set in motion,” hormones travel through the bloodstream to accelerate or suppress metabolic functions.
The trouble is that some stress hormones don’t know when to quit pulling. They remain active in the brain for too long – injuring and even killing cells in the hippocampus, the area of your brain needed for memory and learning. It often requires conscious effort to initiate your relaxation response and reestablish metabolic equilibrium.
The primary area of the brain that deals with stress is its limbic system. Because of its enormous influence on emotions and memory (especially past negative events), the limbic system is often referred to as the emotional brain.
Whenever you perceive a threat, imminent or imagined, your limbic system immediately responds via your autonomic nervous system – the complex network of endocrine glands that automatically regulates metabolism.
To put it in a nutshell, you have a gland in the brain called the hypothalmus, the seat to your emotions. Every thought, negative or positive, responds the hypothalmus, the brain center of switches, to talk to the pineal gland, limbic system, and other areas of your body to release or pull back chemicals. So, every thought you have – either negative or positive, releases good or bad chemicals. Not only that, every cell in your body is affected by chemical releases.
The bible says, bitterness is like a gall. Gall is a poison! So, when a person is in bitterness towards another, god or self, they are literally poisening every cell in their body. This in itself produces cancer and other diseases. Bitterness is stress to the body as well!
The term “stress” is short for distress, a word evolved from Latin that means “to draw or pull apart.” The Romans even used the term districtia to describe “a being torn asunder.”
Distress Signals from Your Brain
When you are in stress or worry, either at work feeling the pressure or at home with your children, husband or financial issues, economic issues, job issues, and you are not able to give it over to the Lord over long periods of time, the death hormone is released poisoning every cell in your body.
In 1 Peter 5:7 it says “7Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.”
When in stress or worry, ther hormones shut down functions during the emergency. Growth, reproduction, and the immune system all go on hold. Blood flow to the skin is reduced. That’s why chronic stress leads to sexual dysfunction, increases your chances of getting sick, and often manifests as skin ailments. With your mind and body in this temporary state of metabolic overdrive, you are now prepared to respond to a life-threatening situation.
What develops, heart issues, all types of anxieties develop, insomnia, depression, allergies, environmental allergies such as MCS/EI and many other diseases develop.
To go further, other poisonous chemicals released when in guilt, shame, bitterness, fear of rejection, fear of man, not able to forgive yourself of life’s issues in the past.
Again, every thought you have releases either good or bad chemicals in the blood. These chemicals affect every cell in your body but also changes DNA code to bring about diseases.
How do we get free! It is learning how to apply God’s ways such as discerning good and evil, casting down thoughts, the word of God, casting our cares to him and trusting him with our lives.
1 John 4:18 “perfect love cast out fear….”
Matthew 6:26-30 – Jesus says “therefore I tell you, “do not worry about your life, what you eat or drink or about your body and what you will wear, is not life more important that food and the body more important than clothes. Look at the birds in the air – did you not sew or reap or stow away barns. Did your heavenly Father feed them. Are you not much more valuable than they? And who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Why do you worry about clothes. See how the lilies of the field grow – they do not labor or spin and did I not tell you that not even Solomon in all of his splendor was dressed like one of these. And that is how God clothes the grass of the field for that is just here today and tomorrow and then thrown into the fire. Will he not much more clothe you? Oh, ye of little faith. So do not worry saying, ‘what shall we eat, what shall we drink and what shall we wear? For the pagans run after all these things and the heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow….for tomrrow will worry about itself and each day has enough trouble of it’s own.
Learn how to deal with the spirit of fear and break loose from the clutches of the invisible enemy. Visit our ischool at http://www.ischool.journey2wholeness.org