How does stress affect health: Stress effects on the body, the whole person

How do you know when you're stressed out?

Stress affects your body and your mind.

Stress is a disruptive condition occurring in response to adverse external influences and capable of affecting physical health, usually characterized by several of the following signs:
- increased heart rate,
- a rise in blood pressure,
- muscular tension,
- irritability,
- depression.

An effect of stress is that you build a picture of the world in which you can convince yourself that there is no choice except continuing to do precisely what you're doing, even though it's clearly not working:

"(he/she) enters a shut-off, impregnable but wholly convincing world where every detail fits and each incident reinforced (his/her) decision."
-- A. Alvarez, in The Savage God

The following extract from a New York Times article illustrates how stress affects your overall health and lifestyle.

"Researchers are also finding links between stress and disease at the molecular level. At Ohio State University, for example, Dr. Ronald Glaser, a viral immunologist, and his wife, Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a psychologist, are reaching across disciplines to understand how stress causes illness.

"Working with other researchers at Ohio State, they have studied the immune response of people who live with an enormous burden of stress: people who care for a spouse who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and who are, on average, 70 years old. The immune systems of the caregivers are clearly compromised, they found.

"What we know about stress is that it's probably even worse than we thought," Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser said.

"Their most recent work focuses on cytokines, molecules produced by white blood cells, and in particular interleukin 6, which plays a beneficial role in cell communication. Like cortisol and adrenaline, interleukin 6 can damage the body in large and persistent doses, slowing the return to normal after stressful events. It has been linked to conditions that include arthritis, cardiovascular disease, delayed healing and cancer, Dr. Glaser said.

"The immune systems of the highly stressed subjects, Dr. Glaser said, "had the levels of Il-6 that we saw in the controls that were 90 years old," which suggests that their experiences "seemed to be aging the immune system" drastically.

These results might be especially important for older workers. "If you're 50 years old and you hate your job, you're going to be stressed; that probably translates into immune changes," he said.