How Stress Affects Your Health, Work, And Relationships

Stress is the body’s natural reaction to threat. It allows you to prepare for challenges and quickly react to emergency situations. For instance, it makes you run and think faster when being chased by a dog. Stress is beneficial for survival but can take a toll on health, work, and relationships when it lasts longer than necessary.

When experiencing a stressful situation, the human body releases hormones into the blood stream that: produces more blood sugar, increases respiratory rate, and elevate blood pressure. These speed up your reaction time, enhances your focus, and gives you more energy and strength which are necessary to handle stress.

Exposure to stress can improve your tolerance of it. However, you should only have moderate episodes of stress to allow your hormone levels return to normal and your body to recover. Too much or long-term stress can cause major problems to emotional and physical health which can later affect your work and relationships.

Short-term stress such as: getting late to work, being stuck on traffic jams, or missing your flight are less harmful as the stress levels subsides after a few minutes or hours. Family arguments, financial burdens, and work-related issues have more impact especially on emotions as they can last for months or years which can lead to more problems.

Long-term stress can cause sleep issues, weight gain, headaches, memory lost, concentration impairment, and weakness. All of these may lead to serious health problems such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and depression. Too much stress may affect your performance at work which may jeopardize your career. Your boss needs your concentration and focus to be efficient in your job.

Stress can also change your behavior making you feel irritable, moody, and restless. These can greatly affect your relationship with your loved ones. How you treat people is important in maintaining  good relationships. Unfortunately, mishandling stress can make you a toxic person that is difficult to deal with. It is important to share your problems with your family and friends to lessen your stress levels and for them to understand your situation.

Overwhelming challenges in life is unavoidable but learning how to deal with them effectively is essential in keeping a healthy and happy life. Stress management includes:

• Doing regular exercises – this acts as a good distraction and causes the release of endorphins in your body which helps uplift mood.
• Getting enough sleep – rest helps your body recover from tiredness which improves concentration, regulates moods, and sharpens your judgment especially when making decisions.
• Have time for yourself – Taking care of yourself, relaxing, and enjoying the things that you like are keys to happiness.
• Build relationships with positive attitude people – having a good support system is a big help when you are going through a difficult situation. Surrounding yourself with positive people will uplift your fighting spirit and make you believe that you can get through things in time.

Being happy is being healthy. Taking care of yourself is important in dealing with the pressure and reducing the impact of stress in your life.

Isabella Whitmore enjoys celebrating life and encourages people to practice happiness and reducing stress. One of her stress relievers is writing articles for https://electrickettlesplus.com, an appliance website that provides easy to use cordless electric kettles.