View all slides | Contents of this slide

Lecture Notes

The next stage occurs after the alarm stage if the stressor is not completely removed, so if you don't completely deal with that stressor, then initiated the alarm stage, then we move into this stage of resistance, but this stage of resistance can also occur in response to non-life-threatening stressors, and these are the stressors that we face most often, such as exams, job interviews, not having enough money, etc. And prolonged time in this stage of chronic stress can negatively impact our health. Now this response is mainly driven by the endocrine system and the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical pathway, or the HPAC pathway, and as you can see in the figure on the right, the beginning of this pathway is a stressful thought; for example, thinking about how you can't pay the rent this month. That stressful thought causes a series of events that eventually leads to the release of cortisol from the adrenal glands, and if the stress is acute, cortisol can help us. So if the stress is a short period of time, cortisol can help us prepare the body to deal with that stressor, but under chronic conditions, cortisol has negative effects on the body such as lowering immunity to disease, raising our blood pressure, increasing abdominal fat, and many other things you can read about in your text. And so, although you're not responsible in this class for knowing the intricate details of the HPAC pathway, you do need to know that keeping this pathway activated for chronic, long periods of time negatively impacts our health, and it's just one reason that we should try to minimize chronic stress in our daily lives.