Vetnews | Junie 2024 10 « BACK TO CONTENTS Burnout, stemming from ongoing stress due to long hours and high workload is leaving the profession strained and exhausted. Gaining knowledge on how to identify the red flags and implement practical strategies to master our resilience in this area can change a practice from managing to thriving! Understanding the physiological consequences of chronic stress on the practitioner Johan P Schoeman University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa The presentation will begin by introducing stress as a non-specific, stereotypical, and similar response of the organism to a myriad of stressors such as cold, heat, injury, and starvation. Stress ranges from an acute physical crisis, such as an attack, to chronic physical challenges such as famines or parasites to psychological and social disruption that occur purely in our heads. The core of this response centres around the rapid mobilisation of stored energy. Heart rate, breathing and blood pressure increase for the optimal transport of nutrients and oxygen. There is clear blunting of the pain response and the unfortunate halting of long-term, expensive maintenance such as digestion, growth, reproduction, and immunity. We will touch on how optimal stresses and challenges increase cognitive and mental performance and discuss how stress which is severe or of long duration actually leads to marked impediments of the above. The presentation will make a clear distinction between positive stress, characterized by brief increases in heart rate, intensified focus, and mildly elevated cortisol, compared to tolerable stress which is serious but mitigated by positive buffering influences or relationships versus toxic stress which is intense and prolonged and unmitigated by buffering influences or relationships. We will also explore the difference between the concepts of homoeostasis, which strives to get the body’s responses back to a single optimum level or set point versus allostasis and allostatic load which represents cumulative “wear and tear”. This cumulative stress gradually elevates the normal set point leading to heightened neural and neuroendocrine responses which characterise many modernday diseases such as type-2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel syndrome, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Ultimately, allostatic overload leads to functional and cognitive decline, premature ageing, and early death. v Events I WVAC 2024
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