The Different Ways Stress Affects Your Body
Stress is natural and everyone should expect to experience some on occasion. Events that range from daily responsibilities like family and work to serious life-changing events like new jobs, new diagnoses, war, or a loved one's death fire off mental, emotional, and physical reactions. In the immediate sense for short-term situations, stress can actually be beneficial. You need to learn how to utilize the burst of hormones that increases breathing and heart rates and readies muscles to react. If stress reactions come too frequently and for too little cause, however, they can do serious harm to your health. Symptoms include anxiety, irritability, depression, insomnia, headaches, muscle pain or tension, fatigue, sleep problems, and changes in general behavior. Get to know the major ways in which stress affects our bodies now.
Affects Your Food And Exercise Habits
Too much stress can impact general habits and behaviors. It can lead its victims to make poor choices in dietary and exercise regimens. Stress can either raise or reduce appetite, but research has shown that either way, individuals under stress with the choice of fatty and sweet foods or less tasty foods that might be healthier go for the former. Research has found a little under a third of individuals experience reduced appetites when stressed; most eat more, and it tends to be calorie-dense food. Psychologists have related eating to the stressed individual's need of some manner of control over situations. Sufferers of chronic stress redirect the source of the stress and achieve a comforting feeling of control. Professionals also liken eating to smoking; smokers use more cigarettes when stressed in much the same manner as individuals eat more under the same circumstances. Individuals also tend to feel fatigue or weariness with chronic stress, and this leads to saying no to normal exercise, choosing more therapeutic activities instead. Stress affects your food and exercise habits negatively.
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Indulging In Addictive Behaviors
As mentioned previously, just like individuals turn to more and less healthy foods when stressed, they are also more likely to turn to activities such as smoking tobacco or other substances. Stressed individuals may also indulge in other addictive behaviors: shopping, playing video games, and gambling are all prime examples of behaviors that can be harmful and addictive if acted out in excess. In fact, stress is a key factor of risk in addictive behavior's beginnings, maintaining periods, relapses, and then treatment failure thereafter. Stress and poor coping mechanisms can affect addiction through the increase of impulse reactions and self-medication. There is significant evidence that links the motivation for addiction to chronic stress. Individuals with situations like abusive childhood experiences, unhappy marriages, harassment, or unhappiness with employment report addiction at higher rates. The greater the traumatic encounters or experiences throughout one's life, the greater the risk of indulging in addictive behaviors later.
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Interferes With Sleeping Habits
The quality and quantity of sleep is powerfully impacted by chronic stress. It leads to lying in bed feeling anxious and worrying, which makes relaxing and quieting the mind enough to fall asleep almost impossible. This experience has led to the phrase that you lose sleep over this, that, or the other thing. Individuals who experience chronic stress sleep less, tend to have less quality sleep overall, and find functioning well in the daytime all the more difficult. If allowed to go unchecked, this cycle will unfortunately only get worse. When you do not receive enough nightly sleep, your body loses even greater amounts of stress hormones. The chemicals connected to deep slumber are the same chemicals that instruct the body to cease producing stress hormones. It is a vicious cycle. Even worse, early evening and afternoon are when stress hormones peak; these are the times when the mind and body should be preparing for sleep by relaxing. Chronic stress definitely interferes with your sleeping habits in punishing ways.
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Can Make You More Prone To Sickness
Poor diet, lack of exercise, and limited sleep with poor sleep quality all take a toll on the body. Chronic stress does something else along with these symptoms: it can make you more prone to sickness since stress weakens the immune system. Take colds for example. They tend to seem to strike when you're emotionally exhausted or overworked. Research linking colds to stress has narrowed in on cortisol, which is known as the stress hormone. The adrenal glands release it when you feel anxious or threatened. One of the jobs of cortisol is to damp down the immune system temporarily: specifically speaking, the inflammatory response. This grants the body greater energy to deal with whatever may be threatening it. Unfortunately, chronic stress is stress that persists, meaning cortisol is steadily being produced, and the immune system is limited in what it can do to fight off illness.
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Can Trigger Other Health Issues
As though victims of stress need yet another thing about which to stress, the very chronic stress itself can be making them sick. It also exacerbates almost any possible health condition. Studies have shown stress seems likely to increase the risk of or worsen conditions like heart disease, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, depression, diabetes, asthma, and gastrointestinal problems. It can cause headaches, chest pain, fatigue, changes in the sex drive, anxiety, lack of focus or motivation, and a feeling of being overwhelmed. It can also lead to menstrual problems, hair and skin problems, acne, hair loss, psoriasis, and eczema, and irritable colon. Chronic stress quite simply wears down the body's mechanisms by taxing them brutally and thus can trigger other health issues.