Is Stress Really As Detrimental To Your Health As Many People Think?

By Author: Donald Saunders
Total Articles: 84
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Doctors have known for a long time that stress can affect your health but we are only now beginning to properly understand exactly how stress can affect the body. Many of the myths surrounding the subject of stress, like the fact that stress can lead to ulcers, are finally being exposed while others are now being confirmed.

Several of the more obvious affects of stress such as, muscle tension, headaches, a rapid heartbeat, hypertension and digestive problems are easily recognized and well known, but there are also a variety of long-term and potentially serious conditions that can be produced by chronic stress.

Studies that have been carried out at the National Institutes of Health and at other institutions for example strongly suggest that stress affects the immune system. Interestingly enough these very studies also show that the affect can be both negative and positive.

Since one definition of stress is that it is simply an individual's 'fight or flight' response to an apparent threat, it can clearly have a positive affect. It can, for example, set off the release of chemicals which help to heal infections ...
... caused by bites. That makes sense when you think about just how evolution may have tailored the immune system to cope with such events.

But, when this response lasts for a lengthy time period, the affects can be detrimental and one result is that the immune system reduces in effectiveness resulting in an increased susceptibility to infection and less resistance to colds and other virus induced illnesses.

Yet another result is a general feeling of tiredness and sometimes even depression. If an individual suffers stress for long periods then a feedback loop develops between the cause of the stress (the clear belief that you cannot solve the problem that is creating the stress) and the affects. This results in a cycle where the belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Chronic stress can also impact your health by compromising you circulatory system. If stress hormones which are released as a result of the 'flight or fight' trigger are not depleted by {some form of physical activity such as fighting off infection|the physical activity of, for example, fighting off infection then they can lead to actual physiological stress on the body.

Hypertension hightens the tension on the walls of blood vessels and can lead to small tears appearing in the blood vessels. If the body then reacts to repair these micro-tears, scar tissue can be produced and this decreases the flow of blood through these vessels.

When stress levels reach very high levels or remain for long enough then a heart attack can occur. The risk of heart attack is also raised in older individuals or in individuals who carry specific genetic characteristics. As the blood vessels narrow, the heart may well not be able to deliver enough blood and oxygen at moments of high demand.

Doctors have also known for a long time that stress can worsen the affects of rheumatoid arthritis and this is now also explained by the affect of stress on the immune system as there is a proven and well documented link between rheumatoid arthritis and the immune system.

Avoiding stress is vital for us all to maintain good health and, luckily, as we gain a better knowledge of stress we are also developing a number of extremely successful stress relief techniques.