A Stressful Life Can Cause Serious Health Problems

Life is a roller coaster of stress sometimes.Your perceived level of threat stimulates a surge of hormones which is the cause of the heightened state of alertness which accompanies the stress. That's why, very often, you find you can neither sleep nor relax while you're in this state.

But, since your body can't continue in this hyper-mode for a long time, you soon find that once the hormone level subsides, you are brought back down. This is when you experience the headaches, moodiness, memory loss, inability to concentrate and, at times, even aggressive behavior.

It's well known that stress suppresses and weakens your immune system, your first line of defense against colds, the flu, and other health issues. Your reaction to stress lowers your body's white blood cell count which reduces your system's ability to heal itself.

Without a doubt, the most widely researched effects of stress on the body deal with the heart. It has been widely publicized that more heart attacks occur at the beginning of the work week Monday than any other day of the week. As an interesting side note, many of those heart attacks occur in the parking lot of the person's place of employment in the morning.

Some of the lesser known physical symptoms of stress reveal themselves in some of the most unlikely places, like the ears, the lungs, and even in the hair. Those racing hormones which give us the ability to react more quickly to our perceived danger also heighten our sense of hearing. While this may sound like a benefit, in reality, it can be a danger. Research conducted at Cornell University revealed that even a moderate amount of noise is capable of elevating the damaging stress hormones.

Another study indicates that a collection of smaller noisy stressors – taken together – can actually be more stressful than one time loud noise. So, moms, it's not your imagination: a loud television in the background, kids yelling and screaming, horns honking and other noises really do send your nerves on end.

A large part of the fight-or-flight response resides in your lungs. One of our first reactions to a stressful situation is to hyperventilate. With hyperventilation, the human body pumps its lungs full of extra oxygen that will soon be needed in the bloodstream to run from threats, which in prehistoric era meant a large, deadly animal.

But today, our threats aren't as overt as that. So for the most part our increased breathing causes dizziness and pains in the diaphragm. Severe stress, additionally, exacerbates existing asthma conditions and any other pre-existing respiratory problems.

You shouldn't be surprised that under conditions of continual stress you discover that your hair isn't as shiny as it once was. In fact, you may even discover that you're losing some of your hair. Hair loss is part of your body's very real reaction to tension. Hair is considered by many a barometer of your inner health. So in stressful situations your hair may be the first part of your body to feel the repercussions.

Those old movies that show a woman who has just been scared witless by some monster suddenly developing a streak of gray hair aren't far from the truth because stress triggers the autoimmune system to attack its own hair follicles.