What Are the Effects of Stress on Your Body?
While each individual is unique in how they respond to the effects of stress, there are certain major stresses in life, which if all occur together, can send a healthy person into a depressive state or create the inability to cope with the simple things in life. A marriage, birth of a child, moving to another place or loss of close contact with previously connected family and friends can all bring about sudden stress symptoms. Past ways of coping, plus one’s emotional makeup will predict how one will be affected by nervous tension and strain.
There are usually physical impacts associated with a great deal of stress that will become obvious. Your immune system will typically grow weaker since so much of your energy is spent coping with whatever is causing the stress, thus making it very easy to become ill. People will generally get aches and pains, have irregular bowel movements, and lose a great deal of energy and stamina. These signs of stress are apt to be the most apparent and can normally be dealt with easily with a little rest and a decrease in stress levels.
The emotional effects of stress are the ones that can affect not only the person experiencing the stress but also their loved ones or close friends. Some of the symptoms of stress are moodiness, irritability, agitation, the inability to relax and feeling overwhelmed. Without working to decrease the amount of negative stress, these symptoms can escalate and possibly cause emotional distance with loved ones and friends. Resentments carried for a long time have a way of affecting our ability to be patient, kind, caring and loving to others. These stored up resentments can either lead to learning to deal with our emotions or they can remain intact and cause all sorts of more damaging behaviors, such as isolation and depression.
Other effects of too much stress can persist well after the ending of whatever produced the stress in the first place, for instance behavioral symptoms. Here you can see your pattern of eating changing, as you consume too much or too little, your sleep habits can suffer also, and you can develop nervous behaviors that aren’t necessarily acute in nature, yet that don’t appear normal to other people. These symptoms of stress are the hardest to put a stop to as your system grows used to them. In extreme cases, strong addictions to substances such as alcoholic beverages, cigarettes and drugs can be formed.
Time is an important and a useful tool to use in dealing with the effects of stress. Look at the stressor and see it for what it really is. This is important in order to learn stress reduction tools to use the next time you are affected by stress. While the current stressor may be gone or at least affecting you less, you need time to repair the damage done to your body and mind. Learning to let the small things in life go isn’t always easy, but it is very important for physical and mental well being. Even if the stressor was a major one, time has a way of healing wounds, but only if you address the stressor and take responsibility for your reactions to it.
Finding stress relief is actually quite easy once you know some simple stress management tips. A bath with lavender bath salts can bring you incredible relief from your stress anxiety. Take this one step further and brew yourself a cup of chamomile tea and sit down and read a book.
