How Stress Affects Your Metabolism

Stressing yourself can do more harm to you than you can imagine. Stress can cause sugar cravings and make it harder to resist them once you eat just one sweet food. When you are stressed, your will power gets depleted and this results in negative moods, which is known as the biggest trigger of cravings all around the world. Sugar only relieves stress in the short term. Stressing yourself every day can actually slow down your metabolism by a significant amount.

Here is how stress affects your metabolism.

1. Stress controls body weight

Stress doesn’t just regulate your eating behavior in the form of comfort eating and cravings. It also controls hormonal and metabolic processes that can lead to weight gain.

So if you watch what you eat and always find yourself on the treadmill and still subject yourself to undue stress, you might still gain unwanted fat and this caused purely by hormonal imbalances. So stress works on your metabolism and your metabolism directly affects your weight.

2. Stress and evolution

Your response to stress is all part of your evolutionary heritage. People who get fat and sick working stressful jobs are evolutionary successes. Unfortunately, our survival drives haven’t quite caught up to the fact that stress no longer means ‘not enough food’. These are responses that just aren’t suitable in the modern environment.

3. How do I prevent this?

The key thing in eliminating stress is preserving energy. ‘How do I preserve energy?” you may ask. Plan all of your days. Don’t over work yourself. Also, it is very important to set aside some time to just rest and sleep as this will go a very long way in rejuvenating and keeping you refreshed.

Related:   4 Ways to Eat and Drink for Energy

You don’t have to avoid every situation that could plausibly be stressful as that is impossible in reality. Just make sure that you don’t let yourself get anxious over things that you can’t control.

image courtesy of: joshbezoniauthor.com, hercampus.com, huffingtonpost.com.

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