Stress: How Does It Affect Your Health

Stress is the body’s response to situations that requires an immediate reaction. It’s the fight or flight response where the body undergoes mental, emotional and physical changes in stressful conditions. It is common to have sudden burst of energy and high levels of endurance during times of stress. There would be increase in heart rate, muscle tension and fast breathing, rush of the blood to the brain and muscles, and release of stress hormones. Digestion and other unnecessary activities are stopped because energy is needed for stressful situations.

So it is common that stress can cause fatigue, headache and digestion problems. Due to fatigue, the immune system in our bodies will be low, so our bodies’ ability to resist opportunistic infections will be hampered. Stress can also cause insomnia which leads to fatigue. Moreover, the release of stress hormones can impair our cognition and increase the unnecessary negative thoughts which will lead to more stress.

Being frequently exposed to stress may increase the risk of a stroke. It can also aggravate asthma symptoms and increased the risk of heart attack. Stress is also known to temporary raise blood pressure levels and blood sugar level. In bedroom matters, stress may also cause loss of sex drive or the ability to orgasm which can interfere with your sex life.

Besides that, stress can contribute to bad habits such as smoking, alcoholism and drug abuse which is use as a temporary mean to escape from stress. All of these can cause problems associated with wealth, health and may also contributed to early death.

In conclusion, it is important to manage stress because it is not possible to avoid stress and be stress-free in your whole life. So, it is important to be able to identify stress and how to relieve stress the best.