After a lot of research it has been established that there is a clear relationship between stress and diseases. In this article, you'll learn about the illnesses and diseases which can be caused by continuous stress. These illnesses include cardiovascular, immune system, diabetes, ulcers and digestive disorders.
Most of these diseases and disorders are caused by the disturbances or imbalances of the hormones in your body. For example, adrenaline hormones help your body in various ways, however when more of this hormone is produced and supplied to the body, it increases your blood pressure. If the blood pressure remains high on continuous basis, it can cause various heart complications. It can harden the arteries which can cause problems with blood supply. It can also build up plaque in the arteries which can block blood supply. The blood pathways can also be narrowed to complicate blood flow. All these issues can later cause heart diseases and heart attack.
You immune system is also an important part of your body to protect you from various diseases and infections. The stress can also affect the immune system which can compromise the defense system built up by this system. In your body, thymus gland produces white blood cells known as T-cells which regular your immune system. When your body goes through continuous stress, the immune system is deprived of many essential resources including nutrients and many others. Thus your immune system is unable to provide strong enough defense against viruses and bacteria to protect you from different diseases.
Stress also plays its role in diabetes. Diabetes is caused by the insulin resistance of the body. With diabetes, body is unable to metabolize sugar properly which causes high sugar levels in the blood. You body uses a hormone called insulin which helps process the sugar from the body and regulates the blood sugar level. Under chronic stress, more adrenal hormone is released which pushes more sugar in the blood, which in turn requires more insulin to regulate it. However, there comes a time when the insulin is unable to regulate these high levels of sugar which causes diabetes.
Ulcers are also commonly caused by continuous stress. This is the breakage of the stomach lining. When you eat something, different digestive acids are produced to digest the food. Your stomach has a lining of the mucus to protect the walls from these acids. However, stress causes overproduction of the stomach acids up to a level which is not bearable by the mucus of the stomach lining. At this excessive acid production stage, the stomach walls are quite vulnerable to damage which causes ulcers.
Another disease which is related to stomach and is caused by stress is the digestive disorders including constipation and diarrhea etc. When you eat food, the brain sends messages to the stomach, in the form of hormones, to digest the food properly. When you're under continuous stress, the brain is unable to send proper messages due to hormonal imbalances in the body. That's why the food is not properly digested and it causes many different problems.
All of these chronic diseases caused by stress can be avoided or controlled effectively, if you know how to manage stress and keep it at a healthy level. You can manage stress at your own by learning about it from different resources and then applying those techniques on continuous basis.
Ahmad Shahzad writes on self help topics including stress, anxiety, anger and nutrition etc. He manages ThinkGalore.com which is a complete self help guide. He also runs a free stress support newsletter.
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