How Does Stress Affect Health?

Teeth Clenching & Grinding, Migraines, Sleeplessness & More

Scientific evidence has demonstrated a fundamental connection between mental and physical health. In fact, 43 percent of adults suffer adverse health effects from stress, and 75-90 percent of all physician office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints.

Stress is linked to the six leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide. Perhaps it is simpler to say that stress affects every part of your body, mind and emotions.

Stress can create medical symptoms directly—headaches, palpitations, body pains, fatigue, rashes and high blood pressure, to name a few—and can also make symptoms due to other causes worse.

With stress on the rise for women, tension is taking it's toll on the body! What you may not know is that stress can be released in many unexpected ways!

According to Robert Sapolsky , stress can cause a “staggeringly diverse” range of ailments:

“…from the common cold and lower-back pain to Alzheimer’s disease, major depressive disorder, and heart attack. Stress hollows out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult-onset diabetes and is a leading cause of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. It’s not that genes and risk factors like smoking don’t matter. It’s that our levels of stress matter more.”

Although stress is a normal physical response to the perception of a threat or danger– a protection mechanism. It helps you stay focused, energetic, alert and even save your life in emergency situations.

But your body does not distinguish between your physical and physiological stress! It will react just as strongly to an argument with your boss or spouse, job instabilities, an overloaded schedule, or financial difficulties.

If you are feeling overwhelmed with problems, your body's emergency stress reaction is “on” all the time and can seriously undermine your physical health and emotional well-being.

Chronic stress disrupts nearly every system in the body. Stress weakens the immune system, wreaks havoc on sleep patterns and metabolic function, increases blood pressure and the risk of stroke.

Some of these are common, but did you know that stress can cause other physical symptoms?

Stress speeds up the aging process, causes digestive upheaval, and tension headaches.

Managing stress levels can prevent the unhealthy snowball effect on your body's interconnected systems. For example, if your worried about losing your job and your stress is through-the-roof, this could be causing bruxism. Your bruxism can cause disrupt sleep routines, which in turn can affect your metabolism and emotional health, causing you to gain weight and feel emotionally sensitive or down. It's all related!

Learning to reduce your stress can impact dramatically on how you feel and on the quality of your life. In fact, reducing your stress can mean the difference between feeling fully alive and functioning at your peak, versus feeling ill and functionally compromised.

Your health is your most important asset.  Protect it by investing in your stress management. 

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