The Different Ways Stress Affects Your Body

Stress is natural and everyone should expect to experience some on occasion. Events that range from daily responsibilities like family and work to serious life-changing events like new jobs, new diagnoses, war, or a loved one's death fire off mental, emotional, and physical reactions. In the immediate sense for short-term situations, stress can actually be beneficial. You need to learn how to utilize the burst of hormones that increases breathing and heart rates and readies muscles to react. If stress reactions come too frequently and for too little cause, however, they can do serious harm to your health. Symptoms include anxiety, irritability, depression, insomnia, headaches, muscle pain or tension, fatigue, sleep problems, and changes in general behavior. Get to know the major ways in which stress affects our bodies now.

Affects Your Food And Exercise Habits

Too much stress can impact general habits and behaviors. It can lead its victims to make poor choices in dietary and exercise regimens. Stress can either raise or reduce appetite, but research has shown that either way, individuals under stress with the choice of fatty and sweet foods or less tasty foods that might be healthier go for the former. Research has found a little under a third of individuals experience reduced appetites when stressed; most eat more, and it tends to be calorie-dense food. Psychologists have related eating to the stressed individual's need of some manner of control over situations. Sufferers of chronic stress redirect the source of the stress and achieve a comforting feeling of control. Professionals also liken eating to smoking; smokers use more cigarettes when stressed in much the same manner as individuals eat more under the same circumstances. Individuals also tend to feel fatigue or weariness with chronic stress, and this leads to saying no to normal exercise, choosing more therapeutic activities instead. Stress affects your food and exercise habits negatively.

Continue reading to learn more about how stress affects the body.

Indulging In Addictive Behaviors

As mentioned previously, just like individuals turn to more and less healthy foods when stressed, they are also more likely to turn to activities such as smoking tobacco or other substances. Stressed individuals may also indulge in other addictive behaviors: shopping, playing video games, and gambling are all prime examples of behaviors that can be harmful and addictive if acted out in excess. In fact, stress is a key factor of risk in addictive behavior's beginnings, maintaining periods, relapses, and then treatment failure thereafter. Stress and poor coping mechanisms can affect addiction through the increase of impulse reactions and self-medication. There is significant evidence that links the motivation for addiction to chronic stress. Individuals with situations like abusive childhood experiences, unhappy marriages, harassment, or unhappiness with employment report addiction at higher rates. The greater the traumatic encounters or experiences throughout one's life, the greater the risk of indulging in addictive behaviors later.

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