Although stress is a normal physical response to the perception of
a threat or danger – a protection mechanism that helps you stay focused,
energetic, alert and even save your life in emergency situations prolonged
high levels of stress can lead to many serious stress related health
problems:
- Increased appetite and food cravings
- Weight gain
- Decreased bone density
- Decreased in muscle tissue
- Suppressed thyroid function
- Increased anxiety
- Mood swings (anger and irritability)
- Increased body fat (especially abdominal fat)
- Higher blood pressure
- Lowered immunity and inflammatory responses in the body, slowed wound healing, and other health consequences
- Memory and learning impairments
- Develop IBS, colitis and ulcers.
Scientific evidence has demonstrated a fundamental connection
between mental and physical health. In fact, 43 percent of adults suffer
adverse health effects from stress, and 75-90 percent of all physician
office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints.
Stress is linked to the six leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide.
Perhaps it is simpler to say that stress affects every part of your whole self: body, mind,emotions, and spirit.
Stress can create medical symptoms directly— palpitations, body pains, fatigue, rashes and high blood pressure, to name a
few—and can also make symptoms due to other causes worse.
What you may not know is that stress can be released in many
unexpected ways!
According to Robert Sapolsky, stress can cause a “staggeringly diverse” range of ailments:
“…from the common cold and lower-back pain to Alzheimer’s disease,
major depressive disorder, and heart attack. Stress hollows out our bones and
atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult-onset diabetes and is a leading cause
of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed
countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single
most important variable in determining the length of a life. It’s not that
genes and risk factors like smoking don’t matter. It’s that our levels of
stress matter more.”
Stress speeds up the aging process, causes digestive
upheaval, and tension headaches.
Managing stress levels can prevent the unhealthy snowball
effect on your body's interconnected systems. For example, if your
worried about losing your job and your stress is through-the-roof, this
could be causing bruxism. Your bruxism can cause disrupt sleep routines, which
in turn can affect your metabolism and emotional health, causing you to gain weight and feel emotionally
sensitive or down. It's all related!
Learning to reduce your stress can impact dramatically on how you
fee, how you look, l and on the quality of your whole life.
In fact, reducing your stress can mean the difference between feeling fully alive and functioning at your peak, versus feeling ill and functionally compromised.
