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Most people aren’t aware they’re under stress and that’s a bad way to live. When you don’t realize that you’re under stress, it continues to grow. The more stress grows, the more damage it does to your health and the faster it ages you.
You might not be able to completely eliminate all the stress in your life. But once you’re aware of it, you can get it under control and controlled stress doesn’t subtract years off your life the way uncontrolled stress does.
When you’re not aware of stress, it can cause issues like high blood pressure, aches and pains throughout your body and inflammation. Out of all of these, inflammation is the worst side effect of stress.
This inflammation is what impacts the health of your body. What inflammation does is wherever it is in the body, it attacks that area. It can weaken bones, injure ligaments, and cause damage to tissues and joints.
When someone is under stress, it causes the production of cytokines. These molecules work as signals and under normal conditions, they’re beneficial. But what stress does is it revs up the production well beyond the point of what the body needs.
The volume of these molecules then go on the attack. This is how inflammatory diseases are made worse. Because stress doesn’t back down from causing excess production of cytokines, it continues to fuel inflammation, which in turn ages the body.
The more stress you’re under, the more inflammation is rampant in the body. When you’re not aware that the stress is going on, the inflammation can then lead to other health issues, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and more.
To get stress under control, you must become aware of what’s going on. You can do this by listening to your body. Pay attention to the state of your emotions and your physical reactions to things that trouble you.
You have to tune in to what you think about situations or people who cause you to feel angry or depressed or anxious. Ingrained thought patterns may need to be changed so that the link between what you deal with and how you react are altered.
The cause of your stress may not be under your control, but never forget that you’re in charge of whether or not you let it affect you – and to what degree. Once you understand the role that your thoughts and emotions play in how your body deals with stress, you can take steps to get it under control.
You need to do a check-in with yourself on a daily basis. Stop and think about whatever you’re faced with and decide what course of action you’re going to take. Sometimes this may be something as simple as changing your mindset. Other times, it might be more involved – such as removing yourself from the source of the stress.