title. I feel like you always hear stuff to the liking of “high stress leads to poor health,” but I am kind of wondering exactly why this occurs.
For instance, it’s said that stress can cause:
- Aches and pains.
- Chest pain or a feeling like your heart is racing.
- Exhaustion or trouble sleeping.
- Headaches, dizziness or shaking.
- High blood pressure.
- Muscle tension or jaw clenching.
- Stomach or digestive problems.
- Trouble having sex.
- Weak immune system.
Imagine, hypothetically, that I were to have a high stress life, but still had good sleep, low blood pressure, and a slow heart rate, while also staying away from unhealthy habits like drinking or addiction.
Would my health still be worse than a person who lives an equivalent, but less stressful life than me?
Yes. The main reason is that the stress response releases a bunch of hormones, specifically cortisol and adrenaline, which cause the fight-or-flight response. A side effect of this is that the body turns off (or at least, slows down) a lot of the functions it uses to take care of itself such as the immune system and digestive system. When this happens constantly over a long period, it can absolutely cause problems because your body is constantly trying to prepare to run away from some predator instead of taking care of itself.
In addition to fight or flight, cortisol is an anti-inflammatory. Which sounds good, but when the body is inflamed and keeps having its complaints obscured by cortisol when you really need rest… the result is more inflammation and possible further damage. So the body provides more cortisol…
Pre-existing unrelated conditions feel even worse from the elevated cortisol, which also elevates cortisol…
It’s a dangerous feedback loop, 0/10, do not recommend.
So, the negative effects of stress don’t come from stress itself, but from the fight-or-flight response it elicits. Could you not just switch to having a different response to stress?
For instance, from “The Upside of Stress” by Kelly McGonigal, it says there can be more stress responses than fight-or-flight. Would this then indicate as long as you don’t show symptoms of the fight-or-flight response (poor immune system, digestive system, etc), your stress doesn’t necessarily have to be harmful to you? :)
edit: Found a cool TedTalk from Kelly McGonigal as well
It goes both ways.
So the best advice probably is to stay as healthy as possible while also being able to do the things that you enjoy.
Stress causes the body to release high levels of cortisol, which can have various harmful effects throughout the body if at high levels persistently. For example, I have Central Serous Retinopathy due to high cortisol, and have been advised by my Ophthalmologist to reduce my level of stress.
You’re lucky your ophthalmologist has a model of causation for this stuff.
I had a vitreous degeneration in both eyes. It must have been caused by something but when I asked my eye doctor his response was “this happens in X% of people”.
Like his entire knowledge of the disease’s etiology is “it’s probabilistic”. He didn’t seem to understand what I was asking when I asked for risk factors.
Doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Yes.
Well, there are direct effects and knock-on effects.
If you are having stress but none of the mentioned symptoms, you probably aren’t having stress. Or at least not the unhealthy chronic variant.
Being stressed in healthy doses every once in a while is not bad for your health. Chronic stress is unhealthy. And that then will result in symptoms. If it doesn’t, we aren’t (by definition) talking about unhealthy chronic stress.
That’s nice to hear :)
I feel as if live what is stereotypically considered a “high stress life” (cPTSD + multi minority), but I’ve always worked hard for my health and thus have low blood pressure and am fairly fit. Because of that, it’s always kind of sucked to see clickbait articles claiming that not only did I suffer through the trauma, but I will also die 20 years earlier due to circumstances completely out of my control.
I imagine these sorts of messages get attention because they can be very validating, but personally I’ve always found platitudes of “mitigate your stress!” annoying because it usually ends with the implication that I am automatically unhealthy because 1) I challenge myself, 2) am a minority, and/or 3) had some bad stuff happen to me a while ago.
Being stressed in healthy doses every once in a while is not bad for your health.
This reminds me of a good book I once read “The Upside of Stress” by Kelly McGonigal, about how if people viewed their stress positively, such as framing it as “excitement” instead of “distress,” they had better health outcomes and were more successful in their given fields. I may have to reread that book sometime :)
It’s not as simple.
Small, infrequent bursts of stress are beneficial, but permanent stress is very harmful.
Simply put, stress kicks your body into overdrive. Staying in overdrive permanently is very bad for your health.
You can compare that to sport. Going to your limits every once in a while can be quite beneficial. Going to your limit 24/7 without any breaks in between will reduce your output below what you’d be able to do normally and in the end will kill you.
It’s the same with about every positive thing: too much of it is usually harmful. Some water is required to survive. Too much water and you drown.
And yes, attitude can mitigate some stress but there’s a certain level of where it becomes unhealthy, no matter what your attitude is. Again, coming back to the sports analogy: Attitude can help you push further, but working in a labour camp until exhaustion will kill you regardless.
If your stress is the kind that can be mitigated by a change of perspective, then it wasn’t significant stress to begin with.
I imagine these sorts of messages get attention because they can be very validating
That’s a pretty big slap in the face speaking as someone who grew up with chronic stress. I’m in my 20s. My thyroid has gone autoimmune on itself. I developed PCOS before puberty even fully set in. I have fibromyalgia, a condition that renders my entire body up in a permanent state of pain and suffering.
I didn’t get to where I am because I didn’t ‘manage my stress well enough’ or ‘didn’t look at it positively enough’. It’s not as simple as bad genetics either because people my age don’t typically have these conditions.
I don’t want to gatekept for not managing stress well enough, so I’ll just put some statistics out there: I’ve moved 26 times growing up, went to 14 different schools, lost 13 pets consecutively, sexually abused before I was 10, called the cops due to life threatening situations 4 times in my life, and went no contact with everyone I was related to. The fact that I made it to adulthood alive should be proof enough that this isn’t a stress management issue.
When you live in chronic distress, not eustress, your body will eventually pay the price. There’s a book called ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ by Vessel Van Der Kolk that does a fantastic job of explaining this. As a result of my body breaking down in pain and no longer being able to exercise, live, and function the way I used to, I will most likely die sooner than I would have if environment conditions didn’t trigger all these latent health conditions. And that’s ok.
What’s not ok is being told that I could have better health outcomes if I had just look at my stress more positively. Buddy, if I look at my stress any more positively than I did I would no longer be managing my stress I would straight up be in denial that anything bad even happened.
Not sure what you think “managing stress” consists of, but in my experience it refers to avoiding life events like you’re describing.
A child can’t effectively manage your stress, but independent of any blame dimension, your disease is 100% attributable to not “managing stress” based on that list of stressors you mentioned.
I think the misconception that you might be having is that the stress is even manageable at all. When people go through trauma at this age to this degree, there is little to no chance of managing it.
It’s like watching someone get injured in an accident and saying that if they had the opportunity to manage themselves better they could recovery without any lasting effects. Some accidents, no matter how well it’s managed by patients or doctors, will still render the patient paralyzed. Not to mention that a worse but more likely outcome is that they don’t make it out alive at all.
There is a survivorship bias here that is not seen on the surface. The reason why I am chronically ill is because the alternative in my situation is that I would be dead. You don’t see the people who had endured trauma and died, because they don’t come on Lemmy and comment.
The best possible outcome from the accident I was in that is my childhood, is that I came out of it alive, albeit physically and emotionally damaged.
Stress itself harms your health.
It’s almost a willing choice on the part of your body. In a million little ways your body can choose to operate in “two” different modes:
(“two” actually means a multidimensional spectrum, a huge vector of floating point values)
Your body’s got High-Alert mode, which involves being ready to fight, ready to hide and strategize, but which causes more breakdown of tissues and organizational systems …
Or it can operate in Low-Alert mode which is less ready to fight, less safe in a dangerous environment, but also causes less degradation of the systems.
Ship at full battle ready — every engine turned on and hot, every sailor at his station, versus a ship at normal daily duty: some systems turned off and being repaired, some sailors snoozing in their bunks, eating.
High Alert mode is stress, basically. Or technically it’s the response to more stressors. You go into High Alert mode and you drain resources faster.
stress is literally standing right behind you with a knife and fork
If you want to spend some time, read up on polyvagal theory.
It explains for a part how stress can cause a lot of unhealthy side effects.
I have heard it simplified as “what goes in, must come out”. If you are experiencing high stress without processing the stress, it will create problems for you physically. However if you are able to integrate stressful experiences mentally/emotionally, you wouldn’t experience adverse effects. So it’s really a matter of whether you hold onto stress or not. That said, I think anybody who is able to manage stress effectively and with a great deal of understanding is also going to be actively working to minimize their exposure to stress to what they know they can reasonably handle. There are other factors as well, such as the quality of your diet, the type of community surrounding you, etc. The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté addresses a lot of this type of thing for anybody curious about how things are linked. Also some good videos on YT if you don’t want to read the whole book haha.
Stress, especially chronic stress, can raise cortisol levels which can result in an inflammatory response which can present as things like joint pain. I also believe there is some sort of emotional connection from cortisol and/or stress that results in poor food or health choices. I think I read somewhere that in the presence of cortisol, your body will convert more energy to fat and something else having to do with an elevated blood sugar, bit I can’t remember.
Exercise can lower cortisol levels even if stress is still present.
I’m not a doctor, herbalist or anybody in any sort of medical field. I just read a lot of books and ask a lot of questions. I could be totally wrong.
The short answer is yes. I’ve lived under considerable stress for the better part of two decades. I don’t know the entire effect, but it has given me slightly higher blood pressure, and my mind is deteriorating.
My entire body hurts all the time in the joints and muscles, and I get regular tension headaches. My heart flutters, and I get dizzy spells. I also have stress-induced asthma… I hope it means my life is shortened, and not that I simply have to live with lower quality of life.
