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.
According to recent research, as many as 90% of illness may be stress-related. While this doesn’t mean that stress is the cause of the illness, stress can be a complicating factor in these diseases. Companies have begun to respond to this information ? stressed employees take more sick days and are less productive. Many companies have started providing employees with stress management training and other corporations have even become active in funding research into stress management.
The body’s immune system works less effectively when the person is under stress. So if two people are exposed to a flu virus and one person is under a lot of stress while the other is not, then the person who is stressed is more likely to develop flu (other things being equal). Their immune system is weakened by the stress, so it has less power to fight off the virus.
The kinds of disease which may occur due to stress can vary from person to person. For those who have a predisposition to certain conditions, these will often worsen when they are experiencing stress.
Diseases which may be caused or complicated by stress include:
- stomach ulcers
- migraine headaches
- high blood pressure
- skin disorders (acne, psoriasis, eczema and the like)
- rheumatoid arthritis
- heart disease
- back 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
While some of these illnesses may crop up during a period of stress, there was as likely as not already a tendency towards the disease and stress simply made it possible for the illness to “beat” the immune system. A person who has a family history of a certain disease may never experience it until prolonged stress suppresses their immune function.
So while the effect of stress in one person might be an asthma attack, another could have angina or even a heart attack and a third person will go buy a bag of donuts and perhaps finish up with diabetes. On the other hand, there are many people who eat very little when they are stressed and can become dangerously underweight.
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.