Will Humphreys explains how chronic work stress floods your body with cortisol and adrenaline, triggering digestive problems, weight gain, hair loss, and a weakened immune system. The mental toll is just as real: your stress tolerance shrinks, decisions get worse, and depression sets in.
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In this video, we're continuing the series on my channel called Stress and Burnout at Work. Hi everybody, my name is Will Humphreys and if you're new to my channel, please consider clicking that subscribe button there below. That makes it possible for me to make videos for you to increase your income, impact and freedom. And today we're doing episode two on how stress and burnout impact your health. If you missed episode one, you, you can hit the button in the right hand corner and hear about my story of stress and burnout. Work related stress and burnout is responsible for over 120,000 deaths in addition to over $190 billion in healthcare related costs in our country every year. This issue simply does not get the attention that it deserves. So we're gonna start by explaining what happens to our brain when it becomes stressful. When our brain experiences stress, it kicks in something called the sympathetic nervous system that results in a release of chemicals called cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. All of which are incredibly useful for short term stress related issues. The best explanation of short term benefits would be as if you were out in the woods and you encountered a bear. When you see the bear, your brain knows that's dangerous. And these chemicals result in an increased heart rate which allows blood to get pumped directly to your muscles. It also increases the senses that you have to become more acute, that you make decisions to protect yourself. But the problem is, is that when you're sitting at home, work or school, stressed out and fixated on what happened earlier, for example, if you were talking to your boss and he was angry at you, our brains receive that stress and interpret it very similarly to when we're out in the woods and we have to confront a bear, which again, our bodies can handle for the short term. But when it happens at work, and it's usually day after day, week after week, our bodies simply cannot maintain its normal health. So what are the physical impacts of stress and burnout? The first is digestion. It's very common to become irregular and develop conditions like ibs. What's interesting is the chemicals that are released also increase our craving for calorie dense foods to prepare us for battle, which of course we're not going to do. And it results in us gaining weight as well. We have impaired immune responses. Our body sacrifices the long term benefits of protection against bacterial and viral diseases for the short term protection to get away from the bear, which of course isn't actually there. Other things like hairless occur for both men and women. In addition to those other ones, there's an impaired sexual function that results, as well as an increased risk for developing strokes and heart attacks. In addition to the physical, we experience mental impacts of having prolonged stress. One study showed that when we have prolonged stress, we become so less tolerant of additional stress that we become like a short fuse. We also have impaired decision making. Although stress gives us increased decision making in the short term, over a long period of time we lose that ability and a combination of all these factors results in depression. So remember, despite everything we just went over, that there is always hope. You will find in this series not only more information on stress, but understanding how to fix it. The next episode in this series is episode three, which is the top 10 symptoms of stress and burnout at work and the question of the day, how else does stress and burnout affect our bodies and mental state? Guys, thank you so much. If you enjoyed this video, please click like and subscribe. As always, for every subscription we do a donation to Feed My Starving Children. Until next time.
