How Stress Affects Your Overall Health

How Stress Affects Your Overall Health

Stress is your mind and body’s natural response to any given demand. Stress can come from performance at work, a significant situation in your life that you are troubled by, or just about any sort of worry and difficulty you are facing. Stress is the sensor your body and mind develops to trigger your fight-or-flight responses.

However, stress is not inherently bad. A good amount of stress can result in a positive response which enables you to face your task or situation at hand. When stress fulfils its intended function, it allows you to stay focused, alert and energetic. On the other hand, an excessive amount of stress could leave you anxious over your worries, causing you to make bad decisions due to overwhelming pressure.

Therefore, managing stress is important as it helps you to stay mentally and physically healthy. Maintaining stress levels enables your mind to stay focused and allows your body to regulate a good blood pressure level.

In this article, we’ll be sharing with you a list of ways that stress could be affecting your mental and physical well-being and giving you tips on how you can cope with it.

Frequent Headaches

If you find yourself having constant headaches, you may want to consider stress as a possible cause for it. Headaches are more likely to occur when you’re stressed as it is a common trigger of tension-type headaches and migraines and can at times even make them worse.

Don’t let stress get to your head. Stress is important and a necessary tool for staying effective and efficient, but if you find stress making concentrating harder, then it is important to manage stress levels by partaking in stress relieving activities such as listening to music, taking a walk in the park or even practicing yoga.

Fatigue 

Stress may not be a direct contributor to fatigue, but it may play a significant role in other ways. High levels of stress can cause worry and anxiety at night which may increase adrenaline levels before going to bed. 

The consequence of going to bed anxious is that it is much harder to fall asleep and get ample rest for the next day. This results in feeling more tired and losing concentration that may cause inefficiency or carelessness at work. Your quality and quantity of sleep is lowered due to this endless cycle of stress and fatigue.

To overcome this, try putting aside your phone and all other digital gadgets at least an hour before going to bed. As your eyes need time to adjust to the darkness of your bedroom, light emitting gadgets can make your body feel energised, hence making it difficult to sleep.

Lack of Motivation

Stress can be an effective motivating tool, feeling pressured to accomplish a task before a given deadline could enable you to feel determined to push on. Likewise, excess or a lack of stress could also cause a lack of motivation. Too much pressure placed on a given task could cause overwhelming pressure which could then result in a lack of motivation.

Therefore, if you feel overwhelmed by a big task or responsibility, try to break it down into smaller, bite-sized portions. For example, look at the immediate steps that have to be taken and tackle them before embarking on the larger and more difficult ones. Accomplishing the smaller and more manageable tasks first helps you build confidence and reassurance that the final product is achievable. 

Irritability or Anger

We can all resonate with being impatient or on edge with friends and family members when faced with great stress. In these moments, we may find ourselves taking out our frustrations on the ones we care and love most.

It is important that we keep healthy relationships with our loved ones and so it is all the more necessary to be mindful of the things we say and do in our moments of great stress.

Therefore, in times of high pressure, be sure to be extra mindful of your words and actions when it comes to interacting with others. It is also important that we have people to share our worries and frustrations with. Telling others about your feelings and concerns can relieve stress and also serves as a reminder that you have support of your loved ones.

Stress is vital for working efficiently if you manage it well. Be mindful of your stress levels and how you react to high amounts of pressure. If you’re overwhelmed and find yourself constantly anxious and worried, try taking a step back to relax your mind.