I’ve read a few articles on stress and disease, and they mention things like how stress causes your body to release stress hormones that can damage the bodies self repair mechanisms, immune system, sleep, etc.
But what are ‘stress hormones’? Is that solely adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol or are there others? Don’t those compounds have a pretty short half life and whatever effects they have wear off rapidly? I thought adrenaline and noradrenaline had a half life measured in minutes.
Read up on Cortisol. From here… emphasis mine.
“Cortisol has been termed the “stress hormone” because excess cortisol is secreted during times of physical or psychological stress, and the normal pattern of cortisol secretion (with levels highest in the early morning and lowest at night) can be altered. This disruption of cortisol secretion may not only promote weight gain, but it can also affect where you put on the weight. Some studies have shown that stress and elevated cortisol tend to cause fat deposition in the abdominal area rather than in the hips. This fat deposition has been referred to as “toxic fat” since abdominal fat deposition is strongly correlated with the development of cardiovascular disease including heart attacks and strokes.”
There may be other stress hormones in humans, eg corticosterone is produced in humans in small quantities and is the major stress-response hormone in some animals. However, the three you mention are the main players in humans.
The stress response is meant to deal with acutely stressful situations, hence the short half-life of the hormones. The negative health effects of stress hormones are mostly associated with chronic stress either through over-exposure to stressful environments or through an intrinsically over-active stress response system. So there is a continual or frequent activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and sympathetic nervous system (the two systems responsible for stress hormone release). The excessive exposure to cortisol, etc overstimulates certain biochemical pathways leading to negative health consequences.