Stress, Anxiety & Depression

- Dr Rajgopal Nidamboor

You are caught in a traffic jam. No big guess. You have an important meeting lined up. No real surprise. Welcome to the stress labyrinth — an inevitable part of our life and also existence.

Stress is nothing short of a frizzy ‘bottleneck.’ It has biological and physiological causes and psychological outcomes. It changes the way we perceive the world, our senses, memory, judgment and behaviour. Most of the biological changes that arrive with the stress response are designed to rally the body’s fuel reserves — to convert them for immediate use. This includes providing extra oxygen required for the organs most likely to need it — the brain and muscles. Put simply, stress ‘acts’ as a sort of ‘go-between’ for one part of the nervous apparatus called the sympathetic nervous system, which deals with the body’s ‘maintenance’ functions, under normal conditions, and for quickly re-adjusting our priorities.

Act 1. Scene 1. Your pulse, blood pressure and breathing rate increase — to help boost the supply of available energy. The heart, as you’d know, beats faster, under stress, and pumps a greater quantity of blood with each beat. Your bronchial tubes dilate to assist the passage for extra air with each breath. The blood vessels supplying the muscles expand just as well. The palms of your hands and the soles of your feet begin to perspire, primarily because a damp surface provides a much better ‘grip’ of things. In like manner, the pupils of your eyes dilate to let in more light and improve your vision. What next? Your mental alertness and reaction time are speeded up.