Hypertension and Heart Disease

Hypertension and heart disease are also believed to be trigg by stress. Before you can look at what you can do to manage your stress, the first order of business is understanding what, exactly, stress is. Generally, stress is defined as a negative emotional experience associated with biological changes that allow you to adapt to it. In response to stress, your adrenal glands pump out stress hormones that speed up your body - your heart rate increases and you blood sugar levels increase so that glucose can be diverted to your muscles in case you have to run. This is knoen as the fight-or-flight response.

The problem with stress hormones in the twenty-first century is that the fight-or-flight respones is not usually necessary, since most of our stress is emotional. Occasionally, we may want to flee from a bank robbery or mugger, but most of us just want to flee from our jobs or our kids! In other words, our stress hormones actually put a physical strain on our bodies and can lower our resistance to disease, which can impact the body from head to toe. We can suffer from these stress-related difficulites: headaches, gastrointestinal problems, bladder problems, heart problems, back pain, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Good things come from good stress, even though it feels stressful or bad in the short term. Stress challenges us to stretch ourselves beyond our capabilities, which is what makes us meet deadlines, "push the envelope", and invent creative solutions to our problems. Examples of good stress include challenging projects; positive life-changing events. Essentially, whenever a stressful event triggers emotional, intellectual, or spiritual growth, it is a good stress. It is often not the event as much as it is your response to the event that determines whether it is good or bad stress.

The death of a loved one can sometimes lead to personal growth because we may see something about ourselves we did not see before - new resilience, for example. So even a death can be a good stress, though we grieve and are sad in the short run.

Bad stress results from boredom and stagnation. When no growth occurs from the stressful event, it is bad stress. When negative events do not seem to yield anything positive in the long run, the stress can lead to chronic and debilitating health problems. This is not to say that we can not get sick from good stress, either, but when there is nothing positive from the stress, it has much more negative effect on our health.

Some examples of bad stress include stagnant jobs or relationships, disability from terrible accidents or diseases, or long-term unemployment. These kinds of situations can lead to depression, low self-esteem, and a host of physical illnesses.