Stress affects your wellbeing in a variety of ways, all negative. Without starting all the biochemical specifics, suffice it to say stress, perceived or actual, floods your body with powerful stress-related chemicals that might be very helpful should you be literally fighting or running for your life, and therefore are very health-destructive otherwise.
Effects Of Force on Your body
Stress cause blood platelets to stay together, which raises blood pressure level.
Stress causes your body to lose important nourishment at a rapid rate, be responsible for nutrient deficiency leading to poor organ and gland function.
Stress interrupts digestion, meaning food goes partially undigested and also you get merely a fraction of the nutrients in the food you would get otherwise.
Stress floods your system with homocystine and cortisol, which are associated with hypertension, cardiovascular disease and a tendency to achieve weight.
Kinds of Stress: Actual And Perceived
Actual stress, that is largely unavoidable, includes environmental stress such as air, water and environmental noise, along with other environmental factors including extreme temperature, dangerous weather and so on.
Actual stress, that is fully avoidable, includes such things as smoking, excessive drinking, a junk-food, fast-food, high-sugar, nutritionally deficient diet, insomnia, pushing yourself physically beyond your limits, and doing something that obviously works against your health and well being.
Causes of psychological stress, most of which is avoidable or certainly able to be modified, can include things like relationship difficulties with a spouse, child or anyone; job-related issues; financial issues; self-esteem issues; goal and achievement related issues, personal integrity issues and so on.
When something happens that directly, physically impacts you, it’s an ACTUAL stress. Drinking polluted water, dropping a hammer in your foot, eating a bag of cookies and washing it down having a quart of sweet tea; these are causes of actual, real stress.
Perceived stress is not actual, perceived stress is due to the story you know yourself by what something means. If your partner runs late without calling, and you get all upset since you decide that means he or she is being unfaithful, then you upset yourself abut something that might ever happen, and being upset about the thing you would imagine produces the SAME negative cascade of powerful stress-chemicals that flood your system as if an actual physical stress had occured.
Perceived Stress May Be More Health-Destructive Than Actual Stress
If you feel about something which hasn’t happened, and your thoughts upset you, the strain reaction to those imagined events is a REAL STRESSOR that affects your wellbeing. This is when someone can use their mind to eliminate their health, even though the strain is imagined, the damage is real.
Research published within the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine reports that perceived stress is much more destructive to your immune system response than actual stress.
Using blood samples taken over a 16-month period from study participants who was simply vaccinated against meningitis C, researchers determined that individuals with high amounts of PERCEIVED STRESS consistently measured fewer protective antibodies than other groups.
Participants were split into 3 groups;
1) Group one had Low ACTUAL Stress without any stress conditions past the ordinary. 2) Group two had High ACTUAL Stress with unusually high stressful circumstances. 3) Group three had High PERCEIVED Stress. Most participants in group three had low to normalcy stress levels, however, they perceived their lives to be highly stressful.
The group with high-perceived stress frequently had very low actual stress.
The group rich in PERCEIVED STRESS tested 80% fewer protective antibodies in their blood than either from the other two groups.
Discussion: The message here is clear; there’s a DIRECT and MEASURABLE link between your defense mechanisms strength and the way your respond to the world around you.
The most known thing about this study may be the clear distinction made between ACTUAL STRESS and PERCEIVED STRESS.
Some of the study participants experienced the loss of a parent during the 16-month study period. By any standard, the death of a loved one is really a highly stressful event, yet even those who work in this highest stress group had perfectly normal amounts of protective antibodies.
Twenty seven percent from the participants reported high amounts of perceived stress throughout the study and, to a person, this 27% had up to 80% fewer antibodies, even though generally, their ACTUAL stress was far less than other participants.
The message is clear. If you believe you’re stressed you get the negative health consequences set up stress is real.
How does perceived stress weaken your defense mechanisms?
When you feel stressed your brain creates a cascade of powerful bio-chemicals called neurotransmitters. There are lots of different types of neurotransmitters, however the long and short of it’s that stress related neurotransmitters can be HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE to your health.
Constantly feeling stressed means you are constantly flooding your body with powerful chemicals that weaken your defense mechanisms and then leave you more susceptible to illness and disease.
Request: The practical application of the information is obvious. Take charge of your feelings and never let tiny problems, (or big things), enable you to get down.
Stressful situations occur, but ACTUAL STRESS, stress that you simply recognize, cope with and move on, will not harm your health.
Monitor your emotions and emotions. If something is troubling you, DEAL WITH IT. Your wellbeing is too vital that you let things bother you for very long, and besides that, (to quote my dad), what difference will it make in a hundred years? And to quote my spouse, what difference does it make within an hour?
Remember this . . .
Stress-related bio-chemicals damage your wellbeing and those chemicals are made IN DIRECT Reaction to YOUR PERCEPTIONS, not in reaction towards the actual situation, which means, simply determining your reaction to things may go quite a distance to helping protect and preserve your health.
Remember, excellent health is a choice you may make, and also you make that choice every day with your diet, nutrition and lifestyle decisions. So learn everything you can… and judge wisely.