Stress Coping: Stress and Your Health

Discover Your Stress Level
Stress in Today's Workplace
Reduce Your Stress
Relaxation Techniques
Body Awareness Exercise

Our minds are continually full of thoughts: things to do, things to say, ideas, dreams, and more. For most of us, this mental chatter consumes every waking minute, and our thoughts are often accompanied by a barrage of emotions that may activate the stress areas of the brain.

When you must respond to stress, you experience reactions in the body that may lead to illness, including elevated blood pressure and decreased function of the immune system. This continuous circuit of thought, emotion, and body response may be harmful in many ways.

For example, if you think, “If my boss gives me one more thing to do” or “If that person says one more stupid thing,” and that thought causes anger or frustration, you are stressing your body’s systems. Even thoughts associated with positive events like “I have so much to do to get ready for the wedding,” can create annoyance or dissatisfaction that can ultimately harm your health.

When you are under stress, certain areas of your brain become activated and the concentration of stress hormones in your blood increase causing:

• your heart to beat more rapidly
• your skin to become sweaty
• your immune system to decrease its ability to protect you from infection
• cells in your brain to be at risk of being damaged
• cholesterol to be more readily deposited into the blood vessels of your heart
• you to feel nervous or depressed

In addition to your body's unconscious reactions to stress, stress may also cause you to intentionally act differently. You may be less active than usual, decide to drink an excessive amount of alcohol, eat foods that are unhealthy, or be unable to sleep normally.

When stressed, our body becomes less able to resist infectious diseases. Diseases such as psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease may become more active. The increased level of stress hormones in your blood when you experience stress increases your risk of heart disease, stroke, and depression, increases your blood sugar, decreases the ability of your wounds to heal, increases your perception of pain, and alters your immune system function.

There is even evidence that when we experience high levels of stress for long periods of time, some cells in our brains may be destroyed, with an associated decrease in mental function.

Though many illness may be made worse by stress, there is no evidence that stress causes cancer. There may be an elevated risk of developing cancer when the immune system does not work properly, and stress decreases the activity of the immune system; however, the decrease of immune system activity by stress is not severe enough to increase the risk of developing cancer. It is also important that individuals with cancer realize that their stress did not contribute to the development of cancer.

Learning how to cope with stress will help healthy individuals deal with the pressures of daily life. For those who are living with disease, stress coping can promote an enhanced sense of well-being and possibly influence the progression of the disease. Examples of conditions that may benefit from enhanced stress coping skills include: