Stress can negatively affect your life in a lot of different ways, and it can really take a toll on your health. Having to continually contend with stress harms both your psychological and physical well-being.
Hormonal Imbalances
Problems with estrogen dominance are a natural repercussion of chronic stress. When you’re dealing with too much stress, it prompts your body to release too much cortisol, a hormone that your brain releases in response to stressors. Excessive cortisol levels can deplete progesterone, a hormone which counteracts and balances estrogen.
Having too much estrogen and not enough progesterone is problematic for men and women alike. Women can experience increased discomfort with menstruation or they may menstruate more frequently than their bodies are naturally programmed to.
Men need progesterone to produce testosterone. When estrogen levels dominate hormonal activity, men experience issues that are typical of low testosterone such as erectile dysfunction.
Women also need testosterone. It supports bone health, and it can help to regulate metabolic activity.
Both sexes may experience problems with mental health and cognitive function when the production of various hormones are outside of normal ranges. If recent changes in your mood, weight, the influence that stress or anxiety is having on hormonal balances may be the culprit.
Rest
You need sufficient rest in order to recharge after a busy day. It’s no secret that feeling stressed out or upset can interfere with your ability to get the rest that you need. When you’re tense or worrying about things, winding down when you want to get to sleep could prove to be extremely challenging. Unfortunately, not getting enough sleep at night can make you even more vulnerable to stress over the course of the following day. In effect, your stress levels and your sleep have a closely-intertwined relationship, so problems with stress and rest can feed into one another.
Making a concerted effort to get an adequate amount of sleep can help to keep stress levels in check. Start turning in around the same time every night rather than going to bed at totally different hours all of the time. Establishing a regular sleep schedule promotes consistent sleep. When your body grows accustomed to sleeping and waking at regular intervals, that will make it easier for you to turn down the volume of worrisome thoughts and anxious feelings when you want to relax.
Focus
Insufficient sleep is just one of several reasons why stressing out hinders focus and concentration. Feeling worried or wired tends to make your thought process kind of frantic. You might find it difficult to devote all of your attention to something because stress is making you fret about a bunch of different stuff all at once.
When stress is driving your thought process in directions where you don’t want it to go, you may find that you have a tough time understanding new things that you’re learning and even remembering what you’ve learned. Also, your performance at work could suffer when. Stress could be preventing you from producing good-quality work or completing tasks in the timeframe that you should be able to.
Digestion
Even if you’re pretty good about eating healthy and you don’t have any underlying gastrointestinal conditions, high stress can put your digestive health at risk. Your gut has an enteric nervous system. In fact, it has even more neurons than your primary nervous system. Your gut’s neural activity it’s closely linked with other neural activity that your brain regulates. That’s why you may feel a flutter of activity in your stomach when you are nervous or agitated.
Being stressed out can disrupt your digestive system’s normal processes. As a result, you may have an upset stomach frequently. Furthermore, you might not be able to readily absorb all of the nutrients that you consume.
Ultimately, it is important to recognize that experiencing stress isn’t just unpleasant. Chronic stress can seriously compromise your well-being. Work on addressing stress levels to protect your physical and psychological health.
