 When you face an emergency, your nervous system immediately activates the adrenal gland. In fact, it's your adrenal medulla that gets activated, which releases your emergency hormones, which essentially transforms your body into a supermode, making you ready to either fight or flight that danger. But this is a temporary state. It cannot last very long. It's perfect to get you out of an emergency situation. But the question we want to try to answer in this video is, what if you have a prolonged state of stress for a longer term? How does your body cope with that? To answer this question slightly logically, let's go back to our emergency hormones. How did they prepare your body to fight or flight? Well, they basically did a bunch of things like they made sure that you're breathing faster, your heart is beating faster, your blood is getting redirected, and you're getting more glucose and a bunch of other things. All of these things are done to make sure that you get a lot more power, a lot more energy being spent per second, so you can do whatever you want to. But if your stress lasts for a longer term, then your body will not be able to sustain this, right? For example, your heart may not be able to sustain the blood pressure. Your glycogen reserves might be going down. So you need some sort of a support to still provide you with more energy, but you need a much more matured sort of a response that can last over a longer term, not like this burst mode that you get due to the emergency hormones. How does that happen? Well, that also happens via the adrenal glands, but this time your brain activates the adrenal cortex, not the medulla. The medulla is for the emergency, but the adrenal cortex will help us in mediating longer term stress. So how does it do that? Well, first and foremost, the brain does it via chemical signals. So your brain is going to send in some hormones that are basically going to activate the cortex and then the cortex will start giving out its own hormones. But before we go into that, can you sort of understand why your brain uses chemical signaling to activate the cortex? What it used the nervous signaling, nervous impulses to activate the medulla earlier? Can you think a little bit about why that makes sense? Well, in the emergency, you want the medulla to be activated instantly. So the fastest way to do that is via nerve impulses. And so it makes sense. But when it comes to cortex, you are going to now deal with a longer term stress. So it kind of makes sense to do it a little bit slower. But anyways, once the cortex is activated, what does it do? Well, it's going to start releasing a bunch of hormones. And these hormones are called corticoids. Corticoids. Now, there are a bunch of corticoids, but we're going to focus on a few of them. And we're going to look at a few functions of them. Which ones are these? Well, if we go back, remember how you were adrenaline and noradrenaline where making your liver break down glycogen faster to get more glucose? Well, now, if you are going into this prolonged stress mode, then there is a good chance that your glycogen reserves may not be enough. So you would need support and get glucose from other sources, not from glycogen, so that it can support your body in giving you the required energy, right? And therefore, one such class of hormone that helps you do that is called glucocorticoids. Glucocorticoids. As the name suggests, these corticoids, or these hormones, are responsible to get you glucose. And the most common example of glucocorticoids. Again, this is a class of hormones, not a single hormone. The most common example of glucocorticoid is probably something that you heard of, cortisol. Let me use green for that. Cortizol. So cortisol is a glucocorticoid, which means its job is, at least its primary job is to try and give you your body glucose, but not from glycogen, from other non-carbohydrate sources. So we give a name to that process of getting glucose from non-carbohydrate sources. It's called glucogenesis. Glucogenesis means synthesis of glucose, and neo means from new sources, from non-carbohydrate sources. For example, it does it by breaking down proteins. So the ones that are supposed to go to your muscles, it breaks your muscles down. And that's fine, because right now you don't probably need big muscles, you need energy. But cortisol also has other effects. For example, another thing that it does, and it's gonna be important for us later on, is it suppresses your immune system. Immune system is suppressed. Can you see how this is good for us? It's good for us because, again, you don't need your immune system right now. Why you spend energy over there? Why spend energy on fighting maybe a small infection that you're having? We can take care of it later. Right now, your goal is to get you out of that immediate stressful environment, wherever you are, maybe that bear is chasing you, I don't know, whatever that is. But for that, divert your energy to the things that matter the most. So immune system is suppressed, and therefore even the inflammation that might be happening, which happens due to the immune response usually, that also goes down. Inflammations go down. And this is one of the reasons why, whenever you do have inflammation, cortisol is often recommended. Cortisol can be used to actually reduce inflammation. And we'll see later on, this has some effects, and we'll talk about that. But anyways, that's glucocorticoids, and that'll help you get glucose. What other corticoids are there? Well, another corticoid that we'll be interested in are mineral corticoids. Mineral corticoids. Okay, what are these? Just from the names of it, you can kind of sort of sense that it has something to do with the mineral balance, minerals. So they basically help in balancing the minerals, creating homeostresses around that. Again, if you take a specific example, there is a particular hormone called aldosterone. Again, apparently it's one of the famous examples. We don't have to remember too many examples. Aldosterone, it has the word aldo, comes from the word aldehyde. So there's an aldehyde group over there. Sterone is coming from the word steroids over there. Well, its main job is to provide electrolyte balance. Electrolyte balance. Let me tell you how this makes sense to me. So by balancing electrolyte, if you can regulate electrolytes, then you can regulate the osmotic pressure. Because depending on how much the salt concentration is, the osmotic pressure changes. And from that, you can basically regulate how much where the water flows. So for example, by increasing the salt concentration, say, in the blood capillaries, you can increase the amount of water that comes into your blood capillaries in turn increasing the blood pressure. So this can actually regulate the blood pressure. You can actually increase the blood pressure supporting your heart. So remember in the emergency situation, your heart was pumping faster and increasing the blood pressure. Well, it can support that now by the middle corticoids can support it as well. And this is how your body responds to long-sterm stressors. Now, before we wind up, let's also talk about what happens in situations that your body has not been evolved for. This body was evolved for a hunter-gatherer time, right? Our modern society is very different. Now we get stressed for non-life-threatening situations. We get stressed at work. We get stressed at relationships and so many other things. What happens to your body if it's stressed for days or weeks or months? Just look at these and think about what kind of things that could happen. Well, first of all, you'll have a lot of cortisol. And because cortisol does gluconeogenesis, it's giving your body more and more energy, which you probably don't need because you don't want to run anywhere, but it's breaking down your muscles, for example, right? Because of this, you lose weight and that extra energy can cause anxiousness. Notice that cortisol also reduces your immune system. That made sense in the earlier world where the stressors were not lasting for months together. But now if the stressors last for months, you're stressed out for months, your immune system is suppressed for months. That means you can catch infections very easily. Not a good sign for your body. Think about the effect of aldosterone that will also be present in your body. That can increase your blood pressure and that's why people always connect stress to blood pressure. High stress can cause high blood pressure. Does it make sense now why this can happen? So if you zoom out a little bit, our body has two levels of coping mechanism for stress. You have the medulla that goes into this fight-or-flight stage, but then you also have the cortex that helps your body do some of these unusual things to start giving you more energy. And when you are stressed out for a long time, this unusual things happen for a longer time and that disrupts your homeostasis, disrupts your regular functioning, causes all sorts of problems.