How Stress Affects Your Health

I got a personal lesson in how stress affects your health when I was driving a semi truck one winter in Nebraska.

I was standing on the slick metal step on the back of a semi tractor in an ice storm on the side of the freeway working on my thermal controls for the trailer. I flinched every time another semi whipped past on the icy road just a couple of feet away. I started getting a headache and my neck muscles tightened so much that they cramped off and on for the next three days. My blood pressure sky rocketed during that incident and then stayed alarmingly high for the next four years. Knowing how stress affects your health was a major factor in choosing to retire from truck driving. When I retired from driving truck my blood pressure returned to near normal in a matter of weeks.

This article explains that stress throws every system in my body out of whack. I really do not want to continue to place myself at risk for what the medical community has called stress related illness. Ramping up my blood pressure to critical levels was uncomfortable for me but many people do not experience symptoms until a life threatening event like heart attack or stroke occurs.

There are other effects of stress that are not discussed in the literature as much as increased blood pressure, heart attack and strokes are. Actually the research is beginning to prove that the immune system is highly vulnerable to stress and is suppressed by hormones created when the individual is under a load of continual stress such as my friend Amelia suffered.

After seven years of caring for a critically ill husband, trying to keep bills paid and taking a full load of university level classes a close friend I will call Amelia found her ability to think logically severely impaired. Doing simple household chores took agonizing effort and after her husbands death she quit doing the dishes, sweeping the floor and picking up the clutter. The state of her house keeping became a mirror of her critically stressed mental and emotional state. None of our little circle of friends thought about how stress affects your health, just about how we could help Amelia with her chores. While prolonged physical stress can be objectively measured it is much harder to quantify and qualify psychological stress.

Then Amelia realized that tiny scratches were not healing well, allergies she had never suffered before became serious problems and a pain she described as like a hot rock developed in the pit of her stomach. Then she developed a nasty case of Shingles and finally wound up in the Urgent Care Clinic where the health care team focused as much on her stress as they did the physical symptoms she had. Teaching Amelia about how stress affects your health and how to recognize and manage stress was a major part of the health care plan that put her back on the road to health and wellness.

When I read the article "Understanding Stress" I found an information box that listed all of Amelia's symptoms as being manifestations of chronic stress. More questions about how stress affects your health began to be topics our little social group explored and we were surprised to see that most of our health issues were affected by stress.

In this article the author tells us that an "estimated 90%" of contacts with health providers are due to stress caused illness or conditions that are negatively impacted by stress.

My good friend J.J. developed diabetes, high blood pressure, and eventually had a severe heart attack. His doctors ask him a lot of questions about lifestyle, family relationships, work environment and other questions that finally pinpointed for them the main causative factor. They told J.J. that his problems could all be traced back to a very high level of chronic stress. I'm pretty sure that none of J.J.'s family had given any thought to how stress affects your health and were basically blindsided by the devastating result of ignoring the building stress levels.

Continuing to learn about how stress affects your health is an ongoing effort in the scientific and medical communities. There are some fascinating findings that explain long term puzzles. Like what causes a condition known as "bruxism". In an article by Mayo Clinic staff, the first thing on the list is "anxiety, stress or tension". That little piece of information may help solve the puzzle of why B.G. has worn and cracked teeth when his diet does not include hard candy or other foods often related to tooth fractures.

B.G. told me that he has not really connected higher stress levels to increased bruxism but then he does not even know when and how much he grinds his teeth. Family members tell him he does it a lot in his sleep but there is little connection between stress and bruxism or bruxism and long term health consequences in the minds of people who haven't read the dental studies. Learning how stress affects your health may connect some dots for B.G. and his family. They are working on ways to lower the over all stress levels in the family.

For a partial list of diseases caused or exacerbated by stress follow this link.

For ways to recognize and manage stress follow these links. http://helpguide.org/mental/stress_signs.htm

http://www.ehealthmd.com/library/stress/str_causes.html . http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/88566/stress_relief_go_punch_something.html?cat=50 . http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/61163/how_to_reduce_stress.html?cat=51