How Stress Affects Health

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It is natural for people to feel stressed. It could be over a problem that requires immediate solving, or caused by waiting for a result or outcome. Stress could also be amplified by the amount of work that needs to be done, much less gets started.

The presence of stress, therefore, is as expected as it can get in one’s daily life. What makes it a bad thing, however, is the effect that it has on the body and your overall health, once you let it get out of control. Various studies have, in fact, found that stress can directly impact the quality of your health. It could also lead to fatal results if not addressed properly at the soonest possible instance. Here are some ways that that stress can impact your overall health.

Physical Effects

Did you know that stress manifests physically? Observe yourself when you’re feeling stressed. You’ll find that your muscles are tight and tense, and possibly, you could even feel a persistent pain. You might even feel a heaviness on your chest, as well as an upset or hyper-acidic stomach.

Other physical manifestations of stress include weight loss, hair loss, skin breakouts, constant headaches, insomnia, and even a lack of sex drive. The more stressed you are, the more these physical symptoms may appear, which could then lead you to further worries, and thus, more symptoms.

Emotional Effects

This leads us to the other way stress affects your health--emotionally. As mentioned above, the manifesting physical symptoms can be really worrisome, which is why people tend to further perpetuate their state of being stressed.

Anxiety, depression, a sense of being helplessly overwhelmed, intense sadness, and lack of drive or motivation and focus all are part of the emotional effects of being stressed. It can be so overwhelming that it becomes such a debilitating condition wherein the person experiencing it simply is frozen and cannot do anything else.

Mood and Behavior

When people are stressed, they’re not usually in the best of moods and dispositions. Think back to the time when you were last stressed. Most likely, you wanted to be left alone, or you were hostile to someone else. Stress can also drive people to pick up less than ideal habits, such as smoking or drinking. It can also lead them to imbibe unhealthy eating practices, such as bingeing, purging, or completely abstaining from eating food.

All of these various effects impact different people differently. What remains constant, however, is the fact that stress does have far-reaching detrimental effects on a person. That is why it is important to address the root cause of the stress as soon as possible, such as through functional medicine Colorado.

In the meantime, however, stress management strategies can help bring you back to your center, so you can get back to being functional, productive, happy, and well.