As seniors, you already are aware of the debilitating effects of stress. How many doctor visits have you made when your physician’s answer to your physical, mental, or perhaps emotional and psychological illness ends with the diagnosis of stress and its released hormones? There are some experts who think that most illnesses are stress-related, either causing the problem or aggravating it.
Even your body’s round red blood cells become distorted in shape and don’t function properly when exposed to chronic stress. Stress can actually kill cells inside of you, causing a weakening of your immune system and leading to auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Concerning the immune system is a research study conducted in the early 1990s. It showed that sustained stress induced reduction in white blood cells that destroy cancer cells in the human body. This destruction leads to an increase in metastasis. A later breast cancer study reestablished this previous finding.
Because the fight/flight stress response involves the release of troublesome hormones and the rechanneling of blood supply with the body’s blood pressure rising and the heart beating faster, it is not difficult to understand the role unresolved stress plays in destroying the circulatory system. It puts undue pressure on blood vessel walls that can lead to bursting of the blood vessels or stroke. The strain on the heart or sudden emotional stress can lead to a heart attack.
Sun City resident Chris Hinde, who recently suffered a heart attack, shared his cardiac doctor’s advice: “You can do just about anything as long as it doesn’t create stress.”
The body’s quickened breathing in this same stress response also has dire implications for asthmatics. Here, repeated or prolonged stressful situations can make the airways over-reactive and precipitate a single attack or many.
While ulcers are not necessarily formed as a result of prolonged stress, they are definitely aggravated and worsened by it, as is the entire digestive system. This is caused by the restriction of blood supply to the area due to the stress response and can lead to the formation of Gastroesophageal reflux disease and irritable bowel syndrome.
All forms of headaches, especially migraines, as well as neck and back pain, can be caused by the tightening of the muscular system, another result of the fight/flight response.
It is also believed in the natural health sciences that because stress prevents the body from returning quickly to its normal balance, pain-related problems, such as fibromyalgia, are the result of the mental/emotional/psychological components of stress or psychosomatic illnesses.
Insomnia is caused by too much of the adrenalin hormone released by stress and too little of the sleep hormone, melatonin.
Diabetes worsens in two ways from stress. First, unhealthy eating (too much and the wrong food) and excessive alcoholic drinking can occur. Second, stress raises the glucose levels of type 2 diabetics directly.
Obesity’s fat storage is directly related to stress. The higher levels of the cortisol hormone deposit excess fat to the abdomen, where it is considered a most dangerous contribution to heart problems.
Depression, anxiety, and panic attacks are shown to increase as a result of stressful jobs. One study showed that 80 percent of workers under continued stress are at higher risk of developing these mental illnesses than non-stressed workers.
Alzheimer’s disease has even been found to be exasperated by chronic stress, as it floods the brain with cortisol leading to memory loss in this situation.
DNA studies have shown the accelerated aging of an additional nine to 17 years among highly stressed mothers. Accompanying this finding is the fact that there is a 63 percent higher rate of death among caregivers than the normal population. This will be discussed in my final Part 5 of this series.
Next edition: Stress: part 4: stress-busting techniques.
