When you think of a long life or longevity, medical advances come to mind. Medical advances serve you when something goes wrong, or “sick care.” Let’s discuss the other side of longevity, or “health care.” It isn’t just preventative doctor visits. They are vitally important, but our life choices play a critical role in how long and how well we live.
There is one common thread in reducing “sick care” and benefiting from “health care,” and that is reducing chronic stress. For more information, keep reading and let’s learn together how chronic stress reduces the length and quality of our lives.
The Effects of Chronic Stress
Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline give us the fight or flight response in an emergency when our life could be in danger. Chronic daily stress takes our body to that same state.
It can start a devastating chain of events reducing our longevity.
Comfort Seeking Behaviors
With activation of stress hormones, our body reacts to those signals and seeks escape first, then comfort seeking behaviors like high carbohydrate eating, weight gain to find relief from our stressors.
Early Demise
We have far more control of our life span, even with bad genes we can avoid them turning on with good lifestyle habits.
The earlier the better and the more the odds are in our favor.