I’ve had my fair share of talking with people who want to lose weight or prevent their disease from getting worse. But nearly all of them had one obstacle in common: stress. This may surprise you, but stress and anxiety cause health problems.
Actually, that may not be surprising at all.
I mean, the Western culture breeds stress. And the hard part is, you can’t really escape it. It’s everywhere.
From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep (and sometimes sleeping can be stressful), you are bogged down with a long list of to-dos and expectations. That’s not even taking into account of stressful events that are outside of your control.
But, the problem is that stress and anxiety are not good for our health. The forms and amounts of stress and anxiety that we normally encounter are actually anti-health.
I’ll show you why…
Why Stress and Anxiety Cause Health Problems
As we have talked about before, the gut and the brain are in constant communication. This is called the gut-brain axis. When something gets off balance with the brain, the gut is affected (and vice versa).
The gut is responsible for making hundreds of brain chemicals. So, when stress hits, the brain sends signals to the gut. The gut, then, changes the types and amounts of brain chemicals it produces.
This throws your whole body off balance.
Now, stress is a natural event and can actually be beneficial at times. But, long-term stress and anxiety are the catalysts behind a lot of health problems – mentally, physically, and spiritually.
Let’s get to those 9 hidden ways stress and anxiety cause health problems…
Way #1: Stress and Anxiety Create Tension
When you become stressed, your body shifts into fight-or-flight mode. Stress hormones are released to target what’s needed to deal with the stress.
One of the consequences of stress is that muscles are put into tension. This is great when you’re being attacked or running from a threat. But, it’s not so great when dealing with finances or a stressful relationship.
When constantly faced with stressful situations, the body remains tense. This leads to muscle aches, headaches, and potentially migraines.
Way #2: Stress and Anxiety Alter Digestion
And if that isn’t annoying enough, you can add digestive problems to the consequences of tension.
When your muscles are tense, the muscles you need for digestion are too. This is why many who are under constant stress deal with constipation. That constipation then leads to bloating and distention (AKA abdomen sticking out).
On the other hand, you may have diarrhea instead. This is because digestion is not on the “needed” list of body functions when under stress.
So, if the body is not focusing on digestion, it’s not able to break down foods properly. If foods aren’t broken down correctly, they are pushed quickly through your digestive tract. Enter the lovely and pleasant diarrhea.
Way #3: Stress and Anxiety Increase Blood Pressure
Another consequence of stress is that it increases your fight or flight hormones – adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. These hormones increase your blood pressure by making your heart pump faster and harder.
If you needed to run away or attack something, then you would be very grateful for this. But, if you just looked at your bank statement for the month then it’s unnecessary.
Here’s where things can go wrong: constant stress means constant high blood pressure. Constant high blood pressure makes having a heart attack or stroke highly likely.
This can be very dangerous.
Way #4: Stress and Anxiety Shift Your Focus
Your fight or flight hormones also cause you to narrow down your focus. In a threatening situation, this is great for focusing on how to remove the threat. But, if you are just dealing with a stressful client, then it may do more harm than help.
The problem is that when you’re stressed, the bigger picture is often difficult to think about. Your body would much rather focus on the thing stressing you out. Can anyone say tunnel vision?
For example, take having to do a multi-layered project. If you look at everything you need to get done from start to finish, you can easily get stressed out. When you’re stressed out, it’s hard to focus on the bigger picture to figure out what needs to be done first.
You get stressed, which blocks you from seeing the overall picture, which frustrates you further. Then you get tired, so you get more stressed. And unless you stop it, you’re on the fast track to spiraling down.
Way #5: Stress and Anxiety Play With Your Mood
On top of shifting our focus, stress also messes with our moods.
Today our natural response to stress is to ignore it. If you have ever tried to read something with a crying baby in the background, you know what happens. You get irritable.
That’s because the more you try to ignore whatever is stressing you out, the more tired it makes you. The more tired you are, the more irritable you get. And being irritable doesn’t help with the stress.
Stress can also lead to depression, if not careful. When we’re stressed out, we become mentally vulnerable to depression because we’re tired and can’t focus straight. Depression can lead to all sorts of other mental and physical problems.
And there ain’t nobody who likes to be depressed.
Way #6: Stress and Anxiety Can Decrease Fertility
Also when under stress, there is a decreased sex drive. This is a consequence of muscle tension, imbalanced hormones, shifted focus, irritable mood, and sex not being on the “needed” list during fight or flight.
Additionally, fertility decreases under stress. That may be due to muscle tension, imbalanced hormones, decreased sex drive, or all of the above. It just goes to show that when your body is stressed, you can’t flourish.
Way #7: Stress and Anxiety Can Cause Weight Gain
Stress can also cause weight gain.
Once you finally start relaxing, cortisol is released. Its job is to tell your body it needs to eat because stressing out took up a lot of energy. The bad thing is that cortisol doesn’t discriminate between stress from a truly taxing event (like fighting a bad guy off) and a not-so-taxing event (like sitting on the couch worrying about bills).
It’s in those not-so-taxing events that you don’t actually need to eat, at least not as much. Yet your body thinks it does. This is where weight gain can come in.
Heard of stress eating? Or comfort eating? Yep, that’s cortisol making your body hungry.
And if not careful, comfort eating over time can lead to the body automatically wanting food every time it’s stressed. This reduces the ability of your body to respond as needed to stress.
This also makes you more likely to have gain weight around your abdomen. And that’s just not cool.
Way #8: Stress and Anxiety Can Cause Weight Loss
On the other hand, stress can cause weight loss.
As said above, your body focuses only on things it needs to do when under stress. And, unfortunately, eating is not one of those things.
That being the case, long-term stress can keep your body from feeling hungry. If you’re not hungry, you don’t eat. And if you don’t eat, your body has to take energy from itself
No calories or nutrients, no energy. No energy, no work.
For all those who think not eating helps you lose weight… Spoiler alert, energy first comes from your muscles. Eventually, your body will use fat, but not without taking from your muscles first.
You see this in a lot of chronic illnesses like cancer. Cancer is very mentally and physically taxing. And once you have cancer, you always have a chance of it coming back.
Living under this kind of stress 24/7 plus the stress of chemo or radiation can cause dangerous weight loss. And with the weight loss comes many other health problems.
So, let’s just say that weight loss from stress is not an ideal way to lose weight.
Way #9: Stress and Anxiety Weaken the Immune System
This is the whopper right here. If there is anything you remember from this article, remember this…
Stress weakens your immune system.
More research is revealing that stress can act as a trigger to a lot of health problems.
There are a lot of theories about how stress does it. It may have something to do with immunity not being on the “needed” list when in fight or flight mode. Or it could be that stress hormones mess with the balance of the immune system so it can’t function 100%.
Or it could be a combination of both. Either way, stress makes you vulnerable to all sorts of things. You are more likely to get a cold, the flu, an infection, etc. when stressed out.
You’re also more like to trigger an autoimmune disease. For some reason, several people with autoimmune diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, celiac disease, have reported a stressful event happening right before having symptoms.
There also may be a link between stress and cancer.
Now, I want to be clear. Research does not show that stress causes cancer, but it is currently showing that stress may speed up its progression.
I also want to emphasize that stress and anxiety may not necessarily cause a disease. But, they do leave your body vulnerable to a variety of things that could trigger a disease. Unfortunately, it is not well known what those things are at this time.
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The tricky part is that every person is unique. So, what stress does in one person’s body may not be what it does in another.
This is why we can’t necessarily say that stress and anxiety cause diseases. But, we can say that stress and anxiety cause health problems like we mentioned above (headaches, digestion problems, decreased fertility, etc.).
What to Do About it…
As long as we ride the roller coaster of stress, we are capable of falling victim to these health problems.
So, here are a few things you can do when you start feeling stressed…
- Write in a journal
- Read a for-fun book
- Practice mindful breathing
- Do yoga
- Take a walk or run
- Spend some time outside
- Take a bath or shower
- Take a nap
There are plenty of other things you can do to calm your mind. The goal is to find something you enjoy that helps you relax, and is not harmful to you (i.e. alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, technology, bingeing).
As you start retraining your brain to go to healthy avenues to manage your stress, then you will be on the track to kicking stress to the curb!
Is there something that you do that calms you down? I’d love to hear about ways you relax in the comments below!