BEYOND THE BASICS (Social distancing, washing your hands, cover your mouth, stay at home). Learn how to protect your immune system, what weakens our immune system, and how to avoid them. Infections such as the flu virus weaken our immune system. Your immune system can be weakened by smoking, alcohol, and poor nutrition. Fear, panic, or stress your emotional health is intricately linked to your immune system.
Fear weakens our immune system and can cause cardiovascular damage, gastrointestinal problems such as ulcers, and irritable bowel syndrome. It can lead to accelerated aging and even premature death.
Fear is Physical. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are released. Your blood pressure and heart rate increase. You start breathing faster. Even your blood flow changes — blood actually flows away from your heart and into your limbs, making it easier for you to start throwing punches, or run for your life.
Fear kicks your fight-or-flight response into overdrive, your adrenal glands secrete adrenaline. Blood flow decreases to your brain's frontal lobe, which is responsible for logical thinking and planning, which is your deeper, more animalistic parts of your brain—including the amygdala.
When stress, anxiety, worry, overwhelm, and isolation are left unchecked they actually reduce the effectiveness of your immune system and make you, and those around you much more susceptible to getting sick.
To help prevent the spread of respiratory disease, you can avoid close contact with people who are sick. If you are ill, you should distance yourself from others, so you do not spread your germs. Distancing includes staying home from work or school when possible.
Fight, Flight, or Freeze
Back in the 1920s, a physiologist named Walter Cannon described what he called the acute stress response. It’s also called the fight or flight response. In the years since physiologists and psychologists have continued to build on and refine Cannon’s work. They’ve come to a greater understanding of how people react to threats using what they now call the fight, flight, and freeze. To fight is to confront the threat aggressively. Flight means you run from the danger. When you freeze, you find yourself unable to move or act against the threat. You may find yourself hiding from the danger.
When you feel threatened, your body immediately responds to the danger. Whether you spring into fight, flight, or freeze your underlying goal is to minimize, end, or avoid the danger and return to a feeling of calm and control. While you have a natural inclination towards these fears, learn strategies on how to control your responses.
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