How Does Stress Affect Your Overall Health?
The main effects of stress on the health are both physical and psychological. These effects range from being unable to sleep to being prone to depression.
How does stress affect your overall health? This is a very interesting question, and a question that you really need to ask yourself.
By finding out how stress affects your overall health you can then see what needs to be done. And in some ways by seeing the health effects of stress you also get a wake up call: Oh, stress really is affecting my health!
This wake up call gives us the momentum and strength to do something. When we see what damage is happening and will happen we, of course, want to do something about it!
We can read theories about how does stress affect your overall health but until you see how this links to your own body why bother?
This chapter shows how stress affects you.
We have looked at what stress is and what the causes and symptoms of stress are. But we will now look at the effects stress has on the body and the mind.
What are the physical effects of stress and what too are the psychological effects of stress?
How does this stress that is surrounding us impact on our bodies and minds?
We will be trying to answer as many of these questions as possible in the following pages.
How Does Stress Affect Your Overall Health?
The effects of stress can be split into two main categories: The effects of stress on the body Psychological effects of stress We will look at both of these in more detail in the following pages. To start off with we will give you an outline of these two categories in order to understand the question of how does stress affect your overall health.
The Effects of Stress on the Body
Some of the effects of stress on the body can be as follows: Heart problems acute stress can cause heart problems especially in older people. Muscle fatigue and muscle ache. Tight shoulders and neck are commonly caused by stress. Tiredness and fatigue related diseases like ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Stress headaches and migraines
Reducing the effectiveness of the immune system e.g. for fighting off coughs and colds. We will look in more detail at these in
The Effects of Stress on the Body
Psychological Effects of Stress
Some of the psychological effects of stress can be found as follows:
Depression
: Low self esteem and self worth Loss of concentration Easy to anger and irritation Feeling unable to cope with everyday situations. A really good way of combating this is to find out more about yourself by doing a
psychological test.
By finding out where you are emotionally and mentally compared with the collective can be a good way of gaining perspective: Do I need help? Am I actually doing pretty well but am giving myself a hard time? Remember the most important aspect of dealing with stress is to be kind to yourself. You don't need to give yourself a hard time. A good resource for products to deal with the psychological effects of stress is
Psychology 4 You.
The products are all developed and designed by a professor of psychology so they really are top of the range products. They come highly recommended.
Short Term and Long Term Effects of Stress
So in answering the question, how does stress affect your overall health we can see that the main effects are physical and psychological. But there are also differences in the short term and long term with stress. In the short term the symptoms of stress are quite slight but still noticeable. These symptoms range from butterflies in the stomach (adrenaline) to an increase in energy. In the long term, the effects of stress can be more dramatic. Loss of sleep, lack of mental concentration and more serious health problems can occur.
The Effects of Stress on the Body
Return from How does Stress Affect Your Overall Health to Stress Relief Choices


|