How To Tell If You Suffer From Symptoms Of Chronic Stress
Sometimes your nervous system has difficulty at distinguishing the differences between emotional and physical threats.
Whether you are super stressed over an argument with your spouse, work deadlines, or a mountain of debt, your body can react just as strongly as if you’re facing a true life-or-death situation. With devastating consequences for your health and well-being.
Stress disrupts nearly every system in your body.
From your immune system to your digestive and reproductive system. Your body tightens up and the created pressure burdens your cardiac cycle. Since stress is usually acute and not chronic, the shutdown of important body functions is not dramatic, because your body can easily recover within a short period of time.
However, if the stress is not acute, but chronic, the burdens on your body become dangerous, daunting and even life-threatening. The deadliest consequences of chronic stress are the increased risk of a heart attack, increased risk of suffering from a stroke and a speed up aging process. Chronic stress also disrupts nearly every system in your body. Just all the time. This increases the risk of a heart attack and stroke, and speeds up the aging process.
Less deadly, but nonetheless problematic consequences are:
Depression and anxiety
Chronic pain
Sleep problems
Autoimmune diseases
Skin irritations like eczema Weight problems
Thinking and memory problems
The easiest answer in order to avoid the negatives effects of chronic stress is to avoid chronic stress wherever you can.
Of course, not everybody is able to do so. Modern life often pushes is in extreme situations, where we have no other choice. It can be a challenging project at work, the birth of a child or the chance to finally fulfill one’s lifelong dream. No matter how it looks like, sometimes we need to put ourselves under constant pressure for a longer periods of time in order to accomplish, what is important to us.
This is not necessarily bad or dangerous, even after three exhausting months at work, your body will easily be able to recover. However, more than often we get used to chronic stress and instead of starting to relax again, we directly dive right into the next project. We start becoming proud of our busyness and instead of enjoying our accomplishments we depreciate our successes by always wanting to become harder, better, faster and stronger. The consequences of our thirst for more don’t show up immediately, which makes it easy to neglect them until it is too late. And this is exactly what makes chronic stress so treacherous. Chronic stress is like taking a loan. You borrow time and well-being from your future self in order to pay for something you want now. And while you not always can avoid taking this loan, it would be very naive thinking that you can borrow forever and ever and ever.
Recognizing the first symptoms of chronic stress, like trouble finding sleep, depression, and anxiety are red flags showing you that you started borrowing too much money from your future and that the time has come to pay something back. The good news is, when you first notice the symptoms of chronic stress, it is not too late. You can start taking a step back and taking care of yourself and getting back to normal. However, if you won’t do it and keep on borrowing from your future self you will sooner than later find yourself in a situation where the pressure of your debt will crush you down, leaving you behind, unable to move anymore.
