emotional stress that tips the balance and shoots up the blood glucose levels.

What is stress ?

Stress is defined by two great scientists of the 1950’s “a phylogenetic response pattern to a demanding situation”. It means that whenever there are demanding situations we need to fight or fly away from, we need to respond by bringing about several changes in the body mind complex to protect ourselves and it is this response that is called stress. What is important to note here is that it is not the situation that is called stress, but it is the response that we call as stress.

How does the body cope up with stressfully demanding situations ?

Whenever you have to fight or fly away from demanding situations, say you are about to face an accident, you need to protect yourself and escape from the danger. This demands many changes that help you. The most important change is the heightened awareness which leads to very brisk reflexes resulting from the intense fear, the first psychological response to any danger. Further, almost instantaneously this is followed by many minute but complex bodily changes all geared up to see that the system is protected with the least residual damage to the tissues.
Let us see what these changes are.

The pupils of the eyes dilate to allow more light to enter the eye for clarity of vision and both lids are widely open resulting in popping out of the eyeballs. To fly away or fight the situation, you need to run very brisk. The muscles all over the body become tightened to increase the resting basic tone to enable the limbs to work in a highly coordinated way. Then the muscles contract vigorously. This needs a lot of energy expenditure. This energy is supplied by the large amount of glucose that is released from the stores in the liver and brought to the muscles