Jamie Colson generally handled life’s stresses in stride — until recently.

Colson, 42, is a nurse and a supervisor at St. Charles Bend, which in itself can be a stressful job. She has a 2-year-old. Over the past year, she’s faced some overwhelmingly sad events. Two of her beloved uncles died. Her sister gave birth to a stillborn.

“2012 has been horrible,” Colson said.

Late last summer, the panic attacks started. They gave her pains in her chest and her stomach.

“Anxiety is what I described it as. Overwhelming, and it never went away,” she said.

Colson has been managing her stress through an arsenal of coping tools: exercise, an improved diet, antidepressants, massage, chiropractic care and new skills in deep belly breathing, a meditative practice that helps her focus her mind.

“The combination of everything makes a difference,” she said. “It’s huge.”

And it’s a good thing to get a grip on, because chronic stress over time triggers a cascade of physiological responses that can increase a person’s risk of heart disease, chronic pain, fatigue, digestive problems, depression, obesity, inflammatory arthritis, Type 2 diabetes and possibly certain cancers.

The stress response

If stress is short lived — say, the adrenaline rush from a near-miss of a potential car accident — it usually serves a purpose and is not harmful.

When stress becomes chronic and the body’s stress-response system is engaged for durations of time, it becomes unhealthy. Chronic stress can stem from work, unemployment, finances, relationship problems, taking care of an elder, a loved one’s death, moving or any number of other things.

In response to stress — whether there’s a real or perceived threat — the body secretes the hormones adrenaline and cortisol to prepare a body for the “fight or flight” response. This is often narrated in the predator-prey scenario: Picture a zebra on the Serengeti when a hungry, predatory lion is stalking.

In zebras as well as humans, stress increases the heart rate and blood pressure, so more oxygenated blood can reach the major muscles required to fight or flee. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, can increase blood sugar, or glucose, which can be used for energy.

Cortisol also dampens some biological functions that could interfere with a body’s urgent “fight or flight” needs. While escaping the proverbial lion, for example, a body doesn’t need to be nourishing its immune, digestive or reproductive systems, so those systems are shut down.

Zebras return to a normal physiological state once the threat of the lion is gone.

“What makes humans different than zebras in Africa is that humans have imaginations,” said Pam Cobbs, a chiropractor and owner of the Freedom Wellness Center in Bend. “We have the ability to keep ourselves in that stressed state when it’s completely unnecessary.”

Humans are not as frequently faced with physical threats as we are with psychological threats, said Gene Kranz, a psychologist at St. Charles Behavioral Health, “but the brain doesn’t distinguish between psychological and physical threats, so the cascade of reaction happens regardless.”

Human bodies can cope with this stressed state if it takes place about 10 percent of the time, Cobbs said, but most of us exist in a state of stress closer to 90 percent of the time.

A source of disease

“Anxiety and depression are usually the first signs of chronic stress,” Cobbs said. “That shows up before disease.”

Chronic suppression of the immune system can lead to autoimmune disorders or allergies, Kranz and others said. And chronically increased blood pressure, or hypertension, can lead to heart disease.

A recent analysis of six studies involving nearly 120,000 people found that those who perceived themselves as having a high level of stress had a 27 percent higher risk of deaths or of “incidents” (described as a diagnosis or hospitalization) from coronary heart disease, compared with participants who said they had a low level of stress.

The study, led by Columbia University Medical Center researchers, was recently published in the American Journal of Cardiology. The researchers also found that the stressed older people in the study were more likely to have heart problems than the younger ones. The authors suggested that might be from the physiological effects of stress compounding over time.

A different study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, points to stress-generated inflammation as a culprit in causing disease. The research team, led by Sheldon Cohen, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, found chronic psychological stress was associated with the body losing its ability to regulate inflammation. Chronic inflammation is believed to promote the progression of some diseases.

“Inflammation is partly regulated by the hormone cortisol, and when cortisol is not allowed to serve this function, inflammation can get out of control,” said Cohen in a news release. Prolonged stress alters the effectiveness of cortisol in regulating the inflammatory response because it decreases tissue sensitivity to the hormone, Cohen said.

Cohen’s earlier work showed that prolonged stress was associated with a higher likelihood of people developing colds when exposed to a virus.

It adds up to bad news for the health of those who live chronically stressed lives.

Take police officers, for example. One study in Buffalo, N.Y., found that the daily psychological stresses associated with police work there put officers at significantly higher risk than the general population for a host of long-term physical and mental health effects including obesity, suicide, sleeplessness and cancer.

Individual responses to stress

Some people seem better equipped to handle stress than others. Some people might work for decades on a police force or in emergency health care before feeling any effects of the stress. Others might crumble after a week.

“For one person, the mortgage is stressful for a variety of reasons. For someone else, it’s not. It might be related to resources … their ability to communicate, exercise, religious beliefs, their ability to use breathing skills and relax,” said Kranz, the St. Charles psychologist.

It also depends on each individual’s perspective, he said. Do they believe they can’t handle the stress, or do they redirect their thinking to more positive thoughts? These skills are largely learned, he said, starting from childhood.

“How did your caregiver deal with certain situations? As kids, we soak up how our caregivers handled stress,” he said. “If you see your caregiver (namely, parents) deal with stress by yelling and anger and throwing, you probably will, too.”

One study also suggested that growing up in a stressful household may affect how a child’s brain works and contribute to the youngster becoming an anxious adult.

High levels of family stress during infancy are linked to different brain function and increased anxiety in teenage girls, according to a long-running study by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, said babies who lived in homes with self-reportedly stressed mothers were more likely to have higher levels of cortisol in their saliva as preschoolers. Then, 14 years later, brain scans on these same girls showed reduced connections between the amygdala — the part of the brain involved with regulating emotion, memory, attention and response to fear — and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex — a part of the brain also involved with emotional regulation.

And both of those factors — high cortisol levels in preschool and different brain activity as young teens — predicted higher levels of anxiety in these girls at age 18. Worth noting: Boys and men in the study did not show these same patterns.

Meditation to manage stress

The Web is filled with tips on how to reduce stress. Many suggest practicing “mindfulness.”

Many professionals prefer the term “mindfulness-based stress reduction” over “meditation,” because of the religious implications associated with “meditation.” Mindfulness, on the other hand, is taught in hospitals and includes education and coping skills.

No matter what it is called, it refers to being aware of one’s breath, physical sensations and thoughts only in the present moment.

Meditation is often a part of yoga and is also taught in classes in Central Oregon. Informal groups meet regularly to share a meditation practice. Research suggests that meditation may help for those feeling stressed, anxious or depressed.

Allison Suran, a physical therapist with Healing Bridge Physical Therapy, said deep belly breathing changes the blood flow in the brain. Under stress, blood goes to parts of the brain associated with immediate reactive responses, which could explain why a person under stress may struggle with memory or creative thinking. Deep diaphragmatic breathing will restore blood to the higher centers of the brain, the cortex, which is involved with problem solving and creativity, she said.

Stress can decrease the blood circulating to the hands, feet and arms when it pushes blood flow in the body’s core for self-protection, Suran said. Deep breathing can increase that circulation back into one’s peripheral parts and stimulate the parasympathetic response system — the “rest and digest” system — and halt the “fight or flight” response.

Suran teaches the importance of “just breathing,” as opposed to diaphragmatic deep belly breathing, which sounds more complicated. What matters, she said, is paying attention to the breath and the sensations within the body.

Just two hours of weekly meditation for eight weeks may have an effect on brain function that lasts even when someone is not meditating, according to a study funded by the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, of the National Institutes of Medicine. Researchers scanned the brains of healthy adults before and after study interventions that included two groups who tried different kinds of meditation and a control group that did not meditate but engaged in some health education. In the meditators, researchers observed increased activity in the amygdala in the brain. Participants also completed questionnaires on depression and anxiety before and after their interventions, and in one of the meditation groups, increased amygdala activation correlated with decreased depression.

Other studies have said mindfulness can improve psychiatric stress and pain. Some suggest that mindfulness practices can reduce physiological inflammation. Meditation has been shown to reduce the activity of certain proteins that shape immune cell gene expression, which is linked to inflammation.

Kranz also suggested other important components of stress management: positive self-talk, any kind of physical activity and social support. Dealing with issues that have been avoided is also helpful — communicating with a coworker who did something to offend you, for example.

Colson, the Bend nurse whose stress levels led to anxiety, has taken a multifaceted approach to her stress management. Along with lifestyle changes, some antidepressants, chiropractic care and massage, she’s also learning how to deep belly breathe, with the help of a high-tech, biofeedback monitoring program called “neuroinfinity” at the Freedom Wellness Center. The program helps her train her brain and her body to work together — to marry her heart rate and her breath, both of which are monitored through sensors and registered on a computer screen.

On a recent day, after work, she showed up at the center and first got a quick, gentle chiropractic treatment which included a cranial sacral adjustment from Pam Cobbs, which looks like a head massage. Then, moving into another room, she wrapped a belt around her middle that would monitor the expansion of her belly with each inhalation. A heart rate monitor was taped to her finger. She was instructed to coordinate her breath and her heart rate with a yellow ball that moved across the computer screen in an upside-down “V.” It’s taken a couple of weeks, but Colson has got this mastered. The lines that measure her breath and her heart rate generally match. She does this for 10 to 15 minutes before getting a massage.

“I thought it was weird at first,” she admitted. As high-tech as it looks, she said, it’s basically just learning how to meditate through deep belly breathing.

“It’s able to connect my mind to my breathing, to help me focus on something besides anxiety,” she said.

The biofeedback practice is probably about 50 percent of what’s effectively lowered her stress and anxiety, she figures. Practicing with the program is training her brain how to respond to stress and how to ward off a panic attack.

“It has worked,” she said. “It doesn’t happen automatically, but I know I have the ability to go there when I have anxiety.”