The human body was built to handle stress. But just because we can handle it doesn’t mean it can’t be harmful. Think of it as salt. Your body can deal with a little, but you can kiss your health goodbye when you start pouring it on.
According to two powerful sources of medical information on the Web, www.WebMD.com and www.MedicineNet.com, our bodies are subjected to two kinds of stress – chronic (long-term) and acute (short-term). Acute stress is what medical professionals for years have called “fight-or-flight,” the internal response your body creates when it feels it’s being threatened, or eustress — pronounced U-stress. Prolonged exposure to these stressors triggers distress in the body, which transforms the helpful acute stress into the destructive chronic distress.
Also in this issue:
· Beating the post-holiday blues
· Use yoga to help beat stress
Over time, the chemicals released by the body to trigger eustress — epinephrine and norepinephrine — pump into the body and can have severe effects. These effects can be felt both emotionally and physically, and, if experienced over a prolonged period of time, can lead to severe health problems.
Chronic stress can debilitate your immune system, flare rheumatoid arthritis, contribute to and trigger stomach ulcers. It is linked to low fertility, erectile dysfunction, complications during pregnancy and painful menstrual periods. Skin problems like acne and psoriasis can flare with increased stress, and it can even make symptoms of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) worse.
Mentally, chronic stress is more likely to do damage. A key trigger to mental stress is an inability to tear the mind from unwanted thoughts, which, for starters, can debilitate social functioning. Spinning thoughts can make it difficult to deal with small problems and impossible to handle the big ones.
Stress can cause irritability, exhaustion and gross inattentiveness. Worry can literally stop your life in its tracks.
But all that is really the lighter, specifically non-fatal, side. Stress has been linked to high blood pressure, abnormal heartbeat, blood clots, hardening of the arteries, coronary artery disease, heart attack and heart failure.
Life for Americans has sped up over the years, and adding more action has added more thought and more worry. Because stress has become old hat, Americans notice less and less how carrying the weight of the world can affect their overall health and performance. We hide it, work around it instead of working to eliminate it.
Our problem is, the more we add the more it hurts.
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