How can stress damage both the body and the mind?

Doctors have been warning people for many years about the dangers of poor stress management.

Many people still believe that stress does not affect the body and is "just a state of mind". What the most stressed people don't know is that the body's natural stress response is primarily a physiological event.

This means that the effects of stress have never been limited to our mind. When a person is stressed, the whole body experiences it too. So the idea that stress is essentially harmless because it is somehow limited to our imagination is actually a dangerous belief.

Because? Because a person suffering from chronic stress for many, many years has a much higher risk of aggravating health conditions such as hypertension. So if you want to be physically healthier, you need to understand how stress actually affects your body.

How is stress created?

The modern stress model provides a simple and clear explanation of how physiological stress is elicited:

Stage 1: Mental and emotional triggers engage. A person perceives an event, situation, action or idea as negative and stressful.

Stage 2: psychological stress related. If a person does not release their emotions and negative thinking, the current situation causes psychological stress.

Phase 3: Physiological Stress or "Fight or Fly" response. Unbridled psychological stress often leads to real physiological stress.

When an instinctive "fight or flight" response takes effect, you feel an immediate rush of adrenaline that temporarily increases speed, strength and endurance.

A person's breathing and heart rate also increase as they prepare for sudden, intense physical activity (for example, escaping real physical danger).

Stress is usually relieved when the perceived threat or danger has finally disappeared. Thousands of years ago, the instinctive "fight or flight" response was extremely helpful to our hunter-gatherer ancestors as they had to deal with wild animals and each other in premodern society.

Scientists believe that the adaptation to stress occurred because our ancestors were almost always exposed to threatening or dangerous situations.

What are the signs that a person is experiencing stress?

Here are some common physical symptoms that a person experiences stress:

Unexplained tiredness or fatigue
A sharp headache that tends to interfere with work at home or housework
Shallow thoracic breathing
Increased heart rate even when the person is not doing strenuous or demanding physical activities
Minor muscle pain
Contractions
Facial cunts
Hand and arm shaking
General feeling of nervousness and anxiety
Insomnia
To sleep
Unexplained sweating of hands and feet
Switching to various substances such as caffeine, alcohol, nicotine and even recreational drugs
The list of symptoms doesn't stop there. Here is a breakdown of the mental symptoms associated with moderate or extreme stress:

Impatient
Being constantly angry
Unexplained mood swings
Feelings of isolation and helplessness
Short-term memory problems
Overall decline in labor productivity
Decreased sexual desire
Confused thinking
Psychological signs of stress often occur when a person has been under stress for a long time. These signs are created because the mind tries to avoid a stressful situation as much as possible.

This is one of the main reasons stressed people are often less productive in the office.

Their minds are so tired of the prolonged stress response that their thinking prevents them from focusing on what to do.

The same happens with college students, who are overwhelmed by the nature and volume of work they have to complete to complete the various subjects.

How severe are the symptoms of stress in the general population?

In the United States alone, it is estimated that 90% of all doctor visits are associated with symptoms related to chronic stress. It is estimated that around 400 million people a month take medications to relieve these symptoms.

Of course, we now know that treating stress-related symptoms is a futile endeavor because it does not address the root cause of the symptom, but merely alleviates the symptom itself.

It should now be noted that the symptoms discussed above may be true signs of other health conditions (and not just stress). Seeing your doctor is still your best bet if you are experiencing symptoms such as a competitive heart rate or persistent headache.