This video, we're going to be talking about general adaptation syndrome. So general adaptation syndrome is essentially a set of physiological reactions that are experienced during periods of prolonged or chronic stress. And this was coined by Hans Selye back in 1956, who basically subjected rats to various types of chronic stressors and then recorded their health and, like, physiological outcomes. And from doing those experiments, he identified three phases that our body goes through during chronic stress. And those are the alarm phase, the resistance phase, and the exhaustion phase.
We're going to go over those in more detail in just one second but before we do I do want to define one term because it's kind of an odd term that you don't hear very much and it's going to be very important for this next part of our lesson and that is stress resistance so stress resistance is essentially the body's ability to adapt to and function under stress. So whenever I say stress resistance, I'm basically talking about the body's ability to function under a period of chronic or prolonged stress. Alright, so let's get into those three phases and as we go through them we are going to be kind of marking them on this graph here where we have stress resistance can be high or low and then we have our three phases along the bottom. So let's begin with our first phase, the alarm phase. So the alarm phase is going to begin as soon as you encounter that stressor and this is basically just the mobilization of the sympathetic nervous system. So this is your body essentially entering fight or flight, the same thing that we've talked about several times now. So I'm going to walk you through an example as we go through these phases.
So when I first had to get on a plane, I was terrified. I used to be terrified of flying, and my first ever flight was this, like, six hour cross country ordeal. It was a whole thing. And when I first got on that plane, goodness gracious, was I in this alarm phase. My sympathetic nervous system was going strong, full on fight or flight.
My heart was racing. My blood pressure was through the roof. My respirations were increased. I was in that kind of initial just pure panic fight or flight response. And if we look at our graph here, during this alarm phase, your stress resistance is actually quite low.
Your body is not resisting that stress. You're not adapting to it. It is having a really huge impact on your body physiologically. Though at this point, stress resistance is pretty low. Now, next up, we're going to enter the resistance phase, and I'm betting you can probably guess what's going to happen here.
So the idea behind the resistance phase is that the body adapts. So essentially, your stress response is maintained, but the magnitude of your stress response decreases. So basically, your body is resisting that stress. So like I mentioned, when I was on that flight, it was a six hour flight, and your body is not going to sustain that level of arousal, that fight or flight, for six hours. You just can't do it.
It takes way too much energy. So basically, I was still stressed. I was still having a stress response, but the magnitude of that response had decreased. So my blood pressure was probably above my baseline, but it had gone down quite a bit from that initial panic response is kind of the idea here. And this resistance phase, depending on how chronic that stressor is going to be, this could last for hours, it could be days, weeks, months, or even years.
So if we're looking at our chart here at this point, the resistance is quite high. So the body, like we talked about, is adapting to that stressor. It's trying to function under it. So you're again still having that stress response, but the magnitude has decreased. Your body is kind of trying to function under that chronic stress.
Now as I'm sure you can imagine, especially if this is lasting for weeks or months or years, this is not super healthy and eventually we're going to enter the exhaustion phase. So the idea behind the exhaustion phase is that at this point your resources are basically depleted. And we're going to begin to see actual physical kind of wear and tear and damage on organs and tissues. Now I got off kind of easy because it was only a six hour flight, so I was just literally exhausted from maintaining a higher level of arousal than usual, for that entire flight. But over time this can have really negative health consequences and we are going to go over those in just one second.
But first, looking at our graph, during this exhaustion phase our stress resistance plummets. Basically, at this point, your body does not have the resources or energy to function under that stress anymore, and so our resistance has gone way down. And like we talked about, this can have some really negative health consequences. So a few health problems that we associate with chronic stress include things like hypertension because you've often had this prolonged period of having high blood pressure or faster heart rate, gastrointestinal issues like IBS or ulcers because we've had decreased blood flow to digestive organs for too long. Type two diabetes is very common because we've had elevated levels of glucose in the blood.
The idea behind that is that it provides more energy during that stress response, but obviously over time that can be quite damaging. Muscle tension and headaches. I'm sure most of us have had a tension headache from stress at some point, unfortunately. And we also begin to see poor immune function. And in our next video, we're actually going to go into a bit more detail on why we see that poor immune function under periods of chronic stress so I will see you guys there bye bye
