Chronic Stress and Your Health

Stress is a physical, mental, or emotional response to threatening or upsetting events. Any event, condition, or environment that adds pressure, or poses a threat or challenge, to your life or general well-being can be considered as stress. The events that trigger stress can be real or imagined. Basically, stress refers to a feeling of physical or emotional tension created by our reaction to some particular events in life; like a student loosing sleep worrying about tests, examinations, and school work, or pressures to meet deadlines and improve your performance at work. The daily pressures of being a wife or husband, parenting, employment, underemployment, unemployment, and finances can be overwhelming and increase the feeling of stress. Long-term stress, otherwise known as chronic stress, is now a major risk factor for many clinical and mental disorders, including nervous breakdown and suicidal thoughts. In this present fast, wireless, and high-tech age that lacks moderation; life is full of challenges, demands, deadlines, hassles, pressures, frustrations, and stress. The hustle to climb the economic or social ladder imposes a lot of stress on both the poor and rich. For today’s modern man and woman, coping with the stresses of life is now a big challenge. Experiencing stress in life is not always bad or harmful. Stress can good in some instances. In normal or small doses, stress can motivate you to do your very best or help you perform exceedingly well under pressure. However, stress becomes harmful and destructive to your mind, body, and spirit when you are constantly on emergency mode to meet the demands of your high-paced modern life everyday without rest or relaxation. Men and women of all ages now contend with increasing psychological and physical stresses that arise from internal and external forces from man-made technological environment that we live in. In the short-term, stress prepares your body to rise up to a challenge to meet a tough situations you may encounter in life with stamina, strength, and focus. However, long-term stress can sap your strength and energy and render you frustrated, overwhelmed, depressed, bedridden, and inactive. Stresses in life whether acute or chronic, can cause tension, anxiety, and worry. Some types of insidious and chronic stressmay be due to hardship, suffering, poverty, bereavement, lack of emotional and/or financial suppoert lack of love life or dating relationships, or discrimination due to race, ethnicity, body weight and sexual orientation. Today, chronic stress has become the scourge of modern society. It is the predominant health problem now faced by most human beings. Chronic stress is now experienced by the rich and the poor, the civilized and the uncivilized, the highly educated and the less educated. It is an irony that the healthcare systems of all nations in this world, both developed and developing, spend trillions of dollars on healthcare delivery and treatment of diseases, without adequate care or concern to the root cause of ill-heath suffered by the modern man and woman in this wireless high tech age, which is chronic stress. The primary cause of diseases affecting humanity today can be traced to the impact of chronic stress on majority of men and women living in this planet called Earth.