The Impact of Chronic Stress on Physical Health

As the demands to meet some certain expectations in our lives, it is actually obvious that there are things we can not do without and that is stress. Sometimes stress can be beneficial and at the same time it can have side effect most especially to our health if not properly managed. Stress most especially chronic stress if not attended to can lead to serious damage to our health. Talking about chronic stress, this means when the stress response has hit a higher level after accumulation of stress that was not attended to. There are several factors that can lead to chronic stress ranging from financial demands, family issues and generally life demanding issues.

Talking about the aspect that which chronic stress affect the physical health is the fact that it affect our cardiovascular system. When we are under stress and due to the hormones like adrenaline, cortisol that is released during stress, it can increase the rate our heart beat faster and this can lead to cardiovascular issues at the end of the day. Chronic stress as it were can be a factor that causes high blood pressure, hypertension and even heart attack. Chronic stress that has been suffered persistently by an individual can lead to cardiovascular diseases.

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Well not only do chronic stress affect our cardiovascular system, it also affect our immune system as it does not allow it to function quite effectively. We might not know but chronic stress affect our immune system and that opens the door to infections, illnesses and all sorts of things that might want to weakened our body system generally. Our immune system plays a major role in protecting our body from harmful pathogens that might want to affect our health negatively but the moment chronic stress begins to affect our immune system, we are prone to be affected with those harmful pathogens.

Research makes me to understand that chronic stress can lead you to have issues with wound healing and causing inflammation. That's not only the side effect of chronic stress to our health. The other aspect is the fact that it affect our digestive health generally. Our digestive system can be affected by stress in terms of the gastrointestinal issues. This can affect the proper functioning of our digestive systems and in fact might lead to ulcers at the end of the day. On several occasions, it has been discovered that the cause of stomach ulcer can be traced to stress most specifically chronic stress.

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Even I find it hard to believe this but with proven result of people cases, a lot of sleep disorders can be traced to chronic stress. Insomnia as an example can be traced to prolong stress because the truth is when we are hit with chronic stress, it is always difficult for us to get sleep not to talk of quality sleep. And as many of us believe, sleep is really important for our physical health and should not be joked with. There are a lot of benefits that sleep offers to our body system and without quality sleep, the health issues will just increase.

The last one I will like to make mention is the fact that chronic stress if not quickly attended to affect metabolism and which accompanied with it certain issues like weight gain, obesity and even diabetes. Like I mentioned earlier, during stress, hormones like cortisol are released to our body system and if this continues persistently, it can lead to accumulation of fat in our body system which can lead to severe weight gain.

For Further Studies.

• https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/health

• https://www.webmd.com/balance/stress-management/stress-symptoms-effects_of-stress-on-the-body

• https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/effects-on-body

• https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/body

• https://www.columbiadoctors.org/news/chronic-stress-can-hurt-your-overall-health#:~:text=Over%20longer%20periods%20of%20time,high%20blood%20pressure%2C%20and%20stroke.