Managing Stress: Long-Term Stress Problems

Dealing with stress for longer than a few weeks without even trying to minimize its impact on you is a short way to suffer from long-term stress. Unless you react fast, you're in a real danger of serious health problems.

Everything begins with depression and outbursts of anger. Typically, these are the first visible effects of chronic stress. People stop caring for others, even if the very ones who do their best to help them. However, this is only a beginning. Soon after, the first health problems occur, usually related to high blood pressure. The chance of a heart attack goes up, average life expectancy goes down. If you are stressed the chances of blocking of heart arteries is slightly increased, especially if you are hit by a stress without prior warning.

However, it is still only the beginning. Soon after risen blood pressure you will start to suffer from various diseases - nothing too serious, but you will soon notice that you don't heal at the same speed anymore. Everything because stress got to your immune system and caused it do be much less effective than normally. As it also hits the digestive system, you can expect all kind of intestines-related problems such as diarrhea.

Diet problems usually comes right away. As stress forces us to consider everything around us either as a friend or as a foe, we feel urged to either cease eating altogether (anorexia) or just the contrary - we start top eat tons of junk food. As stress develops, diabetes is a more and more probable outcome. As our ability to know the right from wrong is seriously clouded by depression and other psychological problems, we may often feel as if there was no way out to normality.

Sleeplessness is another stress-induced problem. If you deal with stress for a long time, you have probably been suffering from sleep disorders for some time now. That's a problem you have to solve ASAP - the less you sleep, the more you are tired, making your stress even worse. Sleeping pills may seem to be a solution, but they quickly cease to work and the danger of later stomach problems or addiction is real.

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