title. I feel like you always hear stuff to the liking of “high stress leads to poor health,” but I am kind of wondering exactly why this occurs.
For instance, it’s said that stress can cause:
- Aches and pains.
- Chest pain or a feeling like your heart is racing.
- Exhaustion or trouble sleeping.
- Headaches, dizziness or shaking.
- High blood pressure.
- Muscle tension or jaw clenching.
- Stomach or digestive problems.
- Trouble having sex.
- Weak immune system.
Imagine, hypothetically, that I were to have a high stress life, but still had good sleep, low blood pressure, and a slow heart rate, while also staying away from unhealthy habits like drinking or addiction.
Would my health still be worse than a person who lives an equivalent, but less stressful life than me?
Well, there are direct effects and knock-on effects.
If you are having stress but none of the mentioned symptoms, you probably aren’t having stress. Or at least not the unhealthy chronic variant.
Being stressed in healthy doses every once in a while is not bad for your health. Chronic stress is unhealthy. And that then will result in symptoms. If it doesn’t, we aren’t (by definition) talking about unhealthy chronic stress.
That’s nice to hear :)
I feel as if live what is stereotypically considered a “high stress life” (cPTSD + multi minority), but I’ve always worked hard for my health and thus have low blood pressure and am fairly fit. Because of that, it’s always kind of sucked to see clickbait articles claiming that not only did I suffer through the trauma, but I will also die 20 years earlier due to circumstances completely out of my control.
I imagine these sorts of messages get attention because they can be very validating, but personally I’ve always found platitudes of “mitigate your stress!” annoying because it usually ends with the implication that I am automatically unhealthy because 1) I challenge myself, 2) am a minority, and/or 3) had some bad stuff happen to me a while ago.
This reminds me of a good book I once read “The Upside of Stress” by Kelly McGonigal, about how if people viewed their stress positively, such as framing it as “excitement” instead of “distress,” they had better health outcomes and were more successful in their given fields. I may have to reread that book sometime :)
It’s not as simple.
Small, infrequent bursts of stress are beneficial, but permanent stress is very harmful.
Simply put, stress kicks your body into overdrive. Staying in overdrive permanently is very bad for your health.
You can compare that to sport. Going to your limits every once in a while can be quite beneficial. Going to your limit 24/7 without any breaks in between will reduce your output below what you’d be able to do normally and in the end will kill you.
It’s the same with about every positive thing: too much of it is usually harmful. Some water is required to survive. Too much water and you drown.
And yes, attitude can mitigate some stress but there’s a certain level of where it becomes unhealthy, no matter what your attitude is. Again, coming back to the sports analogy: Attitude can help you push further, but working in a labour camp until exhaustion will kill you regardless.
That’s a pretty big slap in the face speaking as someone who grew up with chronic stress. I’m in my 20s. My thyroid has gone autoimmune on itself. I developed PCOS before puberty even fully set in. I have fibromyalgia, a condition that renders my entire body up in a permanent state of pain and suffering.
I didn’t get to where I am because I didn’t ‘manage my stress well enough’ or ‘didn’t look at it positively enough’. It’s not as simple as bad genetics either because people my age don’t typically have these conditions.
I don’t want to gatekept for not managing stress well enough, so I’ll just put some statistics out there: I’ve moved 26 times growing up, went to 14 different schools, lost 13 pets consecutively, sexually abused before I was 10, called the cops due to life threatening situations 4 times in my life, and went no contact with everyone I was related to. The fact that I made it to adulthood alive should be proof enough that this isn’t a stress management issue.
When you live in chronic distress, not eustress, your body will eventually pay the price. There’s a book called ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ by Vessel Van Der Kolk that does a fantastic job of explaining this. As a result of my body breaking down in pain and no longer being able to exercise, live, and function the way I used to, I will most likely die sooner than I would have if environment conditions didn’t trigger all these latent health conditions. And that’s ok.
What’s not ok is being told that I could have better health outcomes if I had just look at my stress more positively. Buddy, if I look at my stress any more positively than I did I would no longer be managing my stress I would straight up be in denial that anything bad even happened.
Not sure what you think “managing stress” consists of, but in my experience it refers to avoiding life events like you’re describing.
A child can’t effectively manage your stress, but independent of any blame dimension, your disease is 100% attributable to not “managing stress” based on that list of stressors you mentioned.
I think the misconception that you might be having is that the stress is even manageable at all. When people go through trauma at this age to this degree, there is little to no chance of managing it.
It’s like watching someone get injured in an accident and saying that if they had the opportunity to manage themselves better they could recovery without any lasting effects. Some accidents, no matter how well it’s managed by patients or doctors, will still render the patient paralyzed. Not to mention that a worse but more likely outcome is that they don’t make it out alive at all.
There is a survivorship bias here that is not seen on the surface. The reason why I am chronically ill is because the alternative in my situation is that I would be dead. You don’t see the people who had endured trauma and died, because they don’t come on Lemmy and comment.
The best possible outcome from the accident I was in that is my childhood, is that I came out of it alive, albeit physically and emotionally damaged.
If your stress is the kind that can be mitigated by a change of perspective, then it wasn’t significant stress to begin with.