The effect of stress on health does more to you than make you feel awful, it can also make just about any health condition that much worse according to Jay Winner, MD, author of Take the Stress Out of Your Life and director of the Stress Management Program of a clinic in Santa Barbara.
Stress isn’t just in our heads… it’s a built in physiological response to a threat. When you’re under stress, your body responds, blood vessels constrict, your blood pressure and pulse go up, you breathe faster, your blood is flooded with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Over time, these lead to health problems.
Stress is known to worsen (or increase the risk of) some pretty serious conditions…
- Heart disease: Experts have long noted that Type A personalities have an increased risk of hypertension and heart problems, though no one knows exactly why this is. Doctors also know that sudden, acute stress can trigger a serious cardiac problem.
- Asthma: Lots of studies show that stress worsens asthma, and there’s even some research that suggests that a parent’s chronic stress might increase the risk of a child having asthma.
- Obesity: Having fat in the belly (instead of hips and thighs) poses greater health risks, and this is just where high stress people tend to store it. Stress brings higher levels of the hormone cortisol, and that increases the amount of fat deposited in the belly area.
- Diabetes: Stress affects this condition in two ways, it increases the chances you’ll engage in bad eating behaviors, and it appears to raise the glucose levels of people with type 2 diabetes.
- Headaches: One of the most common triggers is stress not just for the aptly named tension headache, but for more serious migraines too.
- Depression and anxiety: Chronic stress is related to higher rates of both of these conditions. One survey of recent research found that those who had job related stress had an 80% higher risk of depression than those with low stress work situations.
- Stomach problems: While stress has been cleared of causing ulcers, it can make them worse. It’s also a common factor in many other conditions of the digestive tract, including chronic heartburn, GERD and IBS.
- Alzheimer’s disease: In one animal study researchers found that stress might actually make this condition worse, causing the brain lesions to form more quickly. Perhaps reducing stress might slow the progression of the disease.
- Faster aging: Believe it or not, there’s evidence that stress can affect how you age. One study compared the DNA of mothers under high stress with women not under stress. The team found that a particular region of the chromosomes showed the effects of accelerated aging… about 9 to 17 added years.
- Early death: Research examined the health effects of stress by studying elderly caregivers looking after ill spouses and found that caregivers had a 63% higher rate of death than those who where their age but not under that type of stress.
While all that might have you feeling… well stressed, don’t worry. Research suggests that stress management will not only have you feeling better, but might bring some solid health benefits as well. As an example, heart attack survivors found that taking a stress management class cut their risks of a second cardiac even by 74%. Of course, since it’s impossible to remove all the stressors in your life, you’ll need to change how you handle them.
Here are four things to try next time stress hits.
Continues below…
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How To Prevent 10 Stress Induced Health Troubles… Continued…
1) Breathe deeply for just a few minutes to calm the physiological response of your body. You can do this anywhere, any time.
2) Focus on the moment, rather than worrying about the future or obsessing over the past focus on the here and now, what you’re doing right now. Examine details, pay attention to sights, sounds, smells.
3) Reframe the situation, rather than stressing, try to look at the situation in another way… a traffic jam is stressful, but also gives you time to yourself. If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at do change.
4) Keep your perspective, and think about the things that you are grateful for the next time you feel stress taking over. Ask yourself if the reason for your stress will be important in a week, a month, a year. Remind yourself about the ways in which you’re lucky.
While these techniques will help in the moment, there are other things you can do to help yourself manage stress in your life. Regular exercise is key, as exercisers have better moods and more energy than those who don’t.
Learning some relaxation techniques, such as meditation or yoga will also help reduce the effect of stress on health. It might take a bit of time and practice, but the payoff in terms of short-term mood, long term health and overall peace of mind are truly substantial.
