How Stress Affects Your Health?
How does stress affect health? The short answer is negatively ? but there are a number of health problems which can be traced 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 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 type of illness that a person will suffer as a result of stress depends very much on the individual. Most of us have a predisposition to certain medical problems and often, they will get worse when a person is under stress.
These disorders that tend to be caused or exacerbated by stress include the following:
- stomach ulcers
- migraines
- high blood pressure
- skin disorders (acne, psoriasis, eczema etc)
- 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
Some of these conditions may appear for the first time during a stress episode, but often the tendency was already there and had simply not yet manifested as a disease. For example, a person with a family history of rheumatoid arthritis may be fine until a prolonged period of stress causes the disorder to appear 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.
It is also true that a single person may develop several different health problems as a result of stress ? in many cases, more than one at a time. They may also develop different problems in response to different stress episodes; for example, migraines in one case and back pain 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.
