How Stress Affects Your Health?
When considering how does stress affect health, it is important to realize that a wide variety of health problems can be related to stress.
Studies suggest that somewhere between 60% and 90% of illnesses may be either caused or complicated by stress. This does not necessarily mean that stress is the sole cause of the disease, but that it is a factor or is making the disease worse than it would be otherwise. Corporations have taken notice, since stress related illness causes a lot of absenteeism and reduced productivity in the workplace. This has led to a number of companies offering training in stress management to their staff, with some firms going so far as to help fund stress management research.
The immune system cannot work at peak efficiency while you are experiencing stress. Suppose there are two people ? one is under a high degree of stress, the other relaxed. Now expose the two to a flu virus. The person who is under stress is much more likely to come down with influenza than is the person who is not under stress when your immune system is weakened by stress, you are far more likely to get sick.
Each person may be disposed to developing certain problems as a result of stress. When there are preexisting medical conditions, it is unsurprising to see them get worse when going through a stressful time.
These disorders that tend to be caused or exacerbated by stress include the following:
- ulcers
- migraine headaches
- high blood pressure
- skin disorders (acne, psoriasis, eczema and the like)
- rheumatoid arthritis
- heart disease
- back and other muscle pain
- depression
- infertility
- erection problems in men
- menstrual problems in women
- asthma
- irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
- eating disorders
- alcohol and drug abuse
- susceptibility to infections
Some of these conditions may happen for the first time while a person is experiencing stress, but there is often an underlying predisposition to these ailments. In people with a family history of a disease, it may be a stress related suppression of immune function which allows the disease to surface for the first time.
Some may develop heart problems due to stress, others have respiratory difficulties such as asthma and others may eat in response to stress, developing diabetes or becoming obese as the end product of stress. The exact nature of the stress related illness varies from individual to individual.
However, a person would not necessarily have the same reaction every time. Most people will suffer from two or more stress-related diseases or disorders. They may have several symptoms happening at the same time, or they might have an asthma attack one time and a migraine another time.
To answer the question of how does stress affect health as briefly as possible, the answer is in a lot of different ways, all of them negatively.
