Long hours of continuous activity, even just sitting at home, is not good for the brain. When you’re constantly doing something, your body gets used to it and starts to show symptoms of exhaustion and stress. Taking the time to rest at this point is more important than ever.
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Understanding Chronic Stress
People experience different types of stress. When you don’t take regular breaks from work, you may experience chronic stress.
Chronic stress is caused by constant exposure to stressful situations, which results in the increased release of adrenocorticotrophic hormone (CRH) hormones into the body system. These hormones cause fatigue, depression, anxiety, irritability, and many more health problems. This kind of stress often leads to burnout, leading to lower productivity. Recent studies have shown that the relationship between stress and heart disease is very significant. More than 50 per cent of heart attack cases are related to an individual’s exposure to high levels of stress.
When the stress response mechanism goes out of sync, other bodily systems such as blood sugar and insulin remain in fight-or-flight mode. In other words, chronic stress leads to imbalances in your body’s systems. This leads to a domino effect of the stress hormones in the body. Chronic stress then creates physiological signs and symptoms of fatigue, high blood pressure, insomnia, weight gain, irritability, depression, and an increased risk of heart disease and cancer.
Benefits Of Taking A Break
You might ask if stress destroys the body, how does the body repair itself? The answer to this question is taking time to rest. Resting allows your body to recuperate the energy it lost while you were working.
Resting your mind and body provides many health benefits. Read below to learn about the benefits of taking a break:
Rest Reduces Stress
When chronic stress is left unchecked, the adrenal glands are not in a state where they can regulate cortisol levels. This results in a rise in the levels of this stress hormone. When cortisol rises, the person will experience a corresponding rise in the adrenaline and noradrenaline levels in the body. The rise in adrenaline and noradrenaline levels causes increased heart rate, breathing, heartbeat, and body temperature.
Taking a rest from the things that cause you to stress, may it be work or other personal problems, will help you clear your mind. Aside from that, your body will start to rest and recover since it won’t experience the fight or flight mode; it’s usually in when it’s under stress.
Rest Increases Productivity
Taking a break from your daily routine and doing something different for a while can increase productivity. There are many reasons people take breaks, but one reason is to allow the mind to relax and let go of negative thoughts and stress.
Relaxation techniques, such as meditation and yoga, can also help you reduce stress and eliminate negative thinking and unnecessary worry. Even simple things like getting up and walking around the neighbourhood or putting on comfortable shoes will do wonders to help you relax and get you ready to do your work the next day. Being prepared mentally and physically will help improve your job performance.
Rest Boosts Your Immune System
Chronic stress also has many negative effects on the immune system and overall health. These effects include chronic fatigue, high blood pressure, insomnia, depression, poor concentration, decreased energy and memory problems, low quality sleep, and reduced immunity to infectious diseases.
Chronic stress symptoms may be mild or severe, depending on how long the body is exposed to these stresses. Symptoms include restlessness and irritability, difficulty concentrating, helplessness, appetite changes, feelings of being fatigued, difficulty concentrating, headaches, insomnia, lack of motivation, poor sleep quality, and lack of energy.
Rest Restores Your Overall Health
It has been established that chronic stress has a direct link to a person’s likelihood to develop coronary artery disease (CAD) and heart diseases like myocardial infarction (MI), cerebrovascular accident (CVA), and strokes. Furthermore, it has been proven that chronic stress has a direct relationship with mortality, with people exposed to this kind of stress being more likely to die from various causes.
Some of these illnesses include depression and heart attack. It has also been observed that these people are often affected by chronic stress because their mental state is unstable. Their mood is always down, with some going through severe depression episodes and others not noticing they have a problem. However, the problem arises when these individuals try to go through a normal life just like everyone else since the problem is not going away, no matter how hard they try to cope with their stress. Some people may even become so stressed out that they end up committing suicide.
To reduce all the risks of developing these diseases, taking a break is critical. Rest days at work were designed to ensure that nobody in a business is overworked and become sick.
Rest Improves Your Memory
As the brain sleeps at night, its neurons are constantly in sync, which means they have a regular connection between their neurons. While acknowledging the possible contribution of different neuromodulators to these processes, attention is primarily placed on the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is well known to significantly impact numerous brain systems involved with memory consolidation, which takes place at the various stages of normal sleep.
Sleep and memory are intimately linked, as the former relies on the latter. Without proper rest or sleep, you seriously hinder the consolidation of new information. Lack of enough rest can lead to a deterioration of cognitive abilities, especially those related to concentration and memory. If you’re having trouble sleeping, you might be too stressed. This is why taking a break is critical in building a healthy sleeping pattern.
Having enough rest and sleep can make a huge difference in your brain functions, and it’s one of the most important aspects of good health. Not having enough rest and sleep can lead to a host of conditions, including high blood pressure and obesity.
Many people find that being away from work and stress for a little while will make their brains and bodies more refreshed. Making time for a rest day can make you feel more energized and alert. Many people think that taking time to rest means going to bed, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The best thing to do is find out when your body needs a rest, and then plan a day when you will not be working so that you’ll be able to give your body the time it needs to recharge itself.
This is a guest blog by Odessa Pickett
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