Stress is a natural occurrence in our lives. Stressful events has enormous impact on our health. Stress sometimes tend to be positive, motivating you to do things better, but more often to be a negative one.
Stress can be beneficial keeping you well focused, concentrated and effective. But what if stress got out of hand? Long bouts of stress is called chronic stress can cause serious effects on our health. According to American Institute of Stress symptoms of chronic stress includes irritability, anxiety, depression, headache, and insomnia. Stress affects our nervous system, releasing stress hormones adrenaline, and cortisol, increasing heartbeat and sending blood to areas needing it most in emergency cases such as heart, muscles, and other important organs .Activating the Fight or flight response. Stressful situations increases breathing in an effort to quickly distribute oxygen-rich blood to the body, it increases heart to pump faster, increasing blood pressure, therefore increasing the risk for heart attack. With stress, liver produces extra sugar to boost energy but overtime increased in sugar causes type II Diabetes. It can also cause nausea, vomiting, or stomach ache .Chronic stress makes the immune system low.
American Psychology Association offers tips on how to manage stress:
- Understand how you stress
- Learn your stress signals
- Recognize how you deal with stress
- Find healthy ways to manage stress (meditation, exercise, talking things out with family/friends)
- Take care of yourself, eat right , drink plenty of water, exercise, have enough sleep, take regular breaks from work
- Reach out for support
People behave differently with every situation. It is essential to take things easily, learn to control our emotions and behaviors. Storms in our lives come and go, we just have to deal it with great courage and open heart.
By: Mrs. Gale Frances B. Fernandez | Nurse II
