Health and Stress - How Does Stress Affect Your Overall Health?

There is accumulating evidences that show a direct relationship between health and stress. This article talks about how stress affect your overall health and what you can do to equip yourself in coping with the negative effects of stress.
Stress affects us in many ways and it has always been a common complaint among people on how it has affected them in their lifestyle.

What is Stress and how does it affect a person?

Everyone is familiar with stress. It may be unknown to you but we do experience it in varying forms and degrees in our daily life. Through years of research, it shows that having a little pressure or strain can actually be beneficial to us. With a moderate amount of pressure, it makes us more alert, helping to keep us motivated, and making us perform better. However, when there is too much pressure, or when we are under prolonged pressure, negative physical effects of stress will start to show up affecting our physical or mental functioning and that is when it becomes a problem.

The way our body response to an external stressor is meant to protect and support us. However, as the level of pressure gets too great, stress eventually surpasses our ability to cope with it in a positive way. This extended or repeated activation of the response takes a heavy toil on the body and causes various health problems. When this happens, people often describe themselves as being stressed out, burned out, or at wits end. These are common physical symptoms of severe stress and if left unattended, will affect your overall health.

Stress can affect a person both physically and emotionally and the effects may differ from one person to another. At levels severe enough to make one person ill may be quite bearable for another person.

Psychologically, it can make a person feel fatigued, frustrated, angry, apathetic, depressed, and fearful while physically, it can lead to high blood pressure, chest pain, difficulty breathing, heart disease, hair loss, obesity, and immune system related illnesses.

A recent research shows that the effect of pressure on a person's health is tremendous and that anywhere from two-thirds to 90 percent of all illnesses is actually stress related. It goes to show that understanding and acknowledging stress and learning how to manage it is of utmost importance in order for a person to stay healthy.

To find out more about the how your health can be affected by stress and learning how to recognize the signs and symptoms, make sure you check out the article on "How Does Stress Affect Health" .

By Lynette Wong
Published: 10/24/2007
 
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