Can Stress Make You Sick?

Monday’s Tip for the week:  Have compassion for yourself.  Studies show that people who look at their own failures with kindness and understanding are more successful.

Scientist detail in literature that the more stress and negative emotions that are experienced by a person the more damage is done to their health.  Stress does more than just make us feel badly, it makes worse almost any health condition that you can think of.  The following are health conditions associated with stress.

Heart Disease

Researchers have made the connection between stressed out personalities and heart disease and high blood pressure.  Stress has been known, in some cases, to increase the release of cholesterol and triglycerides into the blood.  Two things that contribute to heart disease that may be brought on by stress is smoking and obesity. 

Doctors affirm that heart attacks and other serious heart problems can be brought on by emotional stress.  It is highly recommended that people with chronic heart disease avoid severe stress.

Asthma

Stress makes asthma worse.  This can be experienced second hand as well.  Asthma in children who witness the chronic stress in parents can be worsened.  In fact, one study that measured developing asthma in children with parents that were stressed out showed that their asthma became worse than children with developing asthma that have parents that were not stressed out.

Obesity

Where you store fat plays a large part in health risk.  Fat stored around the abdomen area creates higher health risks than fat stored in the legs.  Unfortunately, people with high stress tend to store their fat in the abdomen.  The hormone cortisol is created in higher levels due to stress.  This hormone contributes to the fat that is deposited in the stomach area.

Diabetes

There are two ways that stress worsens diabetes.  One, it increases bad habits like drinking alcoholic beverages and eating unhealthily.  Two:  Stress directly increases the level of glucose in people that have type two diabetes.

Headaches

Stress is one of the most common causes for both tension and migraine headaches.

Depression and Anxiety

There is a connection between chronic stress and higher rates of depression and anxiety.  One recent study shows that people who have job related stress symptoms had an 80% higher risk of developing diabetes than those who did not have job related stress.

Gastrointestinal Problems

Stress doesn’t cause ulcers but it does have the ability to make them worse.  It has also been discovered that stress can be a contributor to the development of chronic heartburn and irritated bowel syndrome.

Alzheimer’s Disease

A study done on animals has shown that stress causes brain lesions to form more quickly.  The continued formation of brain lesions worsens Alzheimer’s.  It has been speculated by some researchers that if you reduce stress it will slow down the development of the disease.

Accelerated Aging

It has actually been proven that the way you age can be determined by how much stress you suffer.  There was a study done on mothers.  One group of mothers suffered stress as they were caring for children who were chronically ill.  The second group of mothers did not have chronically ill children.  The group of mothers who were stressed aged 9 to 17 more years than the mothers who were not stressed.

Premature Death

There was a study done on the health effects of stress suffered by people who were caregivers to their spouses.  These people, who were under stress, suffered a 63% increase in death compared to people who were their age that were nor caregivers.

Conclusion

Just in case you are wondering how an emotional feeling like stress can make you sick, please consider the following.  Stress is more than something that happens in your head.  It is a built in response to how your body responds to something that threatens it.  Many things happen to your body when you respond to stress.  Changes in vital signs happen.  For one, your blood pressure and pulse rises.  You also experience constriction of the blood vessels and faster breathing.  Additionally, hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline flood your blood stream.  If your body is chronically subjected to stress those physiological changes, if experienced over time, can make you sick.

(facts for this blogpost have been retrieved from http://www.webmd.com/balance/stress-management/features/10-fixable-stress-related-health-problems)

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