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Need another thing to get stressed out about? Your stress itself could be making you sick.

"Stress doesn't only make us feel awful emotionally," says Jay Winner, MD, author of Take the Stress Out of Your Life and director of the Stress Management Program for Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara, Calif. "It can also exacerbate just about any health condition you can think of."

Studies have found many health problems related to stress. Stress seems to worsen or increase the risk of conditions like obesity, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, depression, gastrointestinal problems, and asthma.

Before you get too stressed out about being stressed out, there is some good news. Following some simple stress relief tips could both lower your stress and lower your health risks.

10 Health Problems Related to Stress

What are some of the most significant health problems related to stress? Here's a sampling.

1. Heart disease. Researchers have long suspected that the stressed-out, type A personality has a higher risk of high blood pressure and heart problems. We don't know why, exactly. Stress can directly increase heart rate and blood flow, and causes the release of cholesterol and triglycerides into the blood stream. It's also possible that stress is related to other problems -- an increased likelihood of smoking or obesity -- that indirectly increase the heart risks.
Doctors do know that sudden emotional stress can be a trigger for serious cardiac problems, including heart attacks. People who have chronic heart problems need to avoid acute stress -- and learn how to successfully manage life's unavoidable stresses -- as much as they can.

2. Many studies have shown that stress can worsen asthma. Some evidence suggests that a parent's chronic stress might even increase the risk of developing asthma in their children. One study looked at how parental stress affected the asthma rates of young children who were also exposed to air pollution or whose mothers smoked during pregnancy. The kids with stressed out parents had a substantially higher risk of developing asthma.

3. Obesity. Excess fat in the belly seems to pose greater health risks than fat on the legs or hips -- and unfortunately, that's just where people with high stress seem to store it. "Stress causes higher levels of the hormone cortisol," says Winner, "and that seems to increase the amount of fat that's deposited in the abdomen."

4. Stress can worsen diabetes in two ways. First, it increases the likelihood of bad behaviors, such as unhealthy eating and excessive drinking. Second, stress seems to raise the glucose levels of people with type 2 diabetes directly.

5. Stress is considered one of the most common triggers for headaches -- not just tension headaches, but migraines as well.

6. Depression and anxiety. It's probably no surprise that chronic stress is connected with higher rates of depression and anxiety. One survey of recent studies found that people who had stress related to their jobs -- like demanding work with few rewards -- had an 80% higher risk of developing depression within a few years than people with lower stress.

7. Gastrointestinal problems. Here's one thing that stress doesn't do -- it doesn't cause ulcers. However, it can make them worse. Stress is also a common factor in many other GI conditions, such as chronic heartburn (or gastroesophageal reflux disease, GERD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Winner says.

8. Alzheimer's disease. One animal study found that stress might worsen Alzheimer's disease, causing its brain lesions to form more quickly. Some researchers speculate that reducing stress has the potential to slow down the progression of the disease.

9. Accelerated aging. There's actually evidence that stress can affect how you age. One study compared the DNA of mothers who were under high stress -- they were caring for a chronically ill child -- with women who were not. Researchers found that a particular region of the chromosomes showed the effects of accelerated aging. Stress seemed to accelerate aging about 9 to 17 additional years.

10. Premature death. A study looked at the health effects of stress by studying elderly caregivers looking after their spouses -- people who are naturally under a great deal of stress. It found that caregivers had a 63% higher rate of death than people their age who were not caregivers.

Continued

Still, you might be wondering why. Why would stress make us sick? Why would an emotional feeling wreck havoc on our bodies?

Stress isn't only a feeling. "Stress isn't just in your head," Winner says. It's a built-in physiologic response to a threat. When you're stressed, your body responds. Your blood vessels constrict. Your blood pressure and pulse rise. You breathe faster. Your bloodstream is flooded with hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.

"When you're chronically stressed, those physiologic changes, over time, can lead to health problems," Winner tells WebMD.

Stress Management Works

While the number of health problems related to stress might be alarming, don't despair. Studies suggest that stress management techniques will not only make you feel better, but they might have concrete health benefits.

For instance, one study of heart attack survivors found that taking a stress management class slashed their risks of a second cardiac event by 74%. There's even some evidence that stress management will improve immunity.

Still, many of us remain skeptical about stress management. After all, our lives are just plain stressful. We have busy jobs, families to raise, tight finances, and no time to spare. Stress management might seem like a nice idea, but completely impossible.

It's true that you might not be able to remove all the stressful things from your life. But you can change how you respond to them, Winner says. That's what stress management is all about. Learning some basic stress relief techniques isn't difficult, either.

4 Ways to Fight Back Against Stress -- and Improve Your Health

The next time you feel stressed, here are four stress relief tips you can try.

1. Breathe deeply. Just a few minutes of deep breathing can calm you and tame the physiologic stress response, Winner says. While building in a specific time to relax each day is a good idea, one advantage to deep breathing for stress relief is that you can do it anywhere -- at your desk or in your (parked) car, for instance.
Winner recommends that as you breathe out, you relax a specific muscle group. Start with the muscles in your jaw. On the next breath out, relax your shoulders. Move through the different areas of your body until you're feeling calm.

2. Focus on the moment. When you're stressed, you're probably living in the future or the past. You're worried about what to do next or regretful about something you've already done. To get some stress relief, instead try focusing on what you're doing right now.
"You can calm yourself by bringing yourself back to the present moment," says Winner. "If you're walking, feel the sensation of your legs moving. If you're eating, focus on the taste and the sensation of the food."

3. Reframe the situation. So you're already running late and then find yourself stuck in terrible traffic. Getting worked up is a natural reaction, but it won't help you at all. Rather than swearing and pounding the steering wheel, get a different perspective. Look at that time as an opportunity -- a few minutes to yourself where you don't have any other obligations.

4. Keep your problems in perspective. It might seem Pollyannaish, but the next time you're feeling stressed out, think about the things for which you're grateful.
"We get stressed when we focus so much on a specific problem that we lose perspective," says Winner. "You need to remind yourself of the basic ways in which you're lucky -- that you have family and friends, that you can see, that you can walk." It can be a surprisingly effective method for stress relief.

Continued

While these stress management techniques can help in the moment, you can also make a few larger changes to your way of life. Regular exercise is key to long-term stress management, says Winner. People who exercise tend to have better moods and more energy than people who don't. What's more, regular exercise will independently lower your risks for many health problems.

Learning some relaxation techniques, meditation, or yoga will help with stress management, too. Getting good at any of these approaches will take a little time and practice, but the payoff -- for your short-term mood and long-term health -- could be substantial.

Sources

SOURCES:

Jay Winner, MD, author, Take the Stress out of Your Life; founder and director, Stress Management Program, Sansum Clinic, Santa Barbara, Calif.

American Diabetes Association.

American Heart Association.

Blumenthal, J. Archives of Internal Medicine, October 1997.

Family Caregiver Alliance: "Selected Caregiver Statistics."

Kabat-Zinn, J. Psychosomatic Medicine, 1998.

Sapolsky, R. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dec. 14, 2004.

Shardass, K. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 20, 2009.

Siegreist, J. European Archives of Psychiatry & Clinical Neuroscience, 2008: vol 258, Supplement 5: pp 115-119.

News release, University of California.

WomensHealth.gov.

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10 Health Problems Related to Stress That You Can Fix

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Need another thing to get stressed out about? Your stress itself could be making you sick. "Stress doesn't only make us feel awful emotionally," says Jay Winner, MD, author of Take the Stress Out of Your Life and director of the Stress Management Program for Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara, Calif.

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This article talk about the difficulties medical researchers have in empirically proving that the mind influences the manifestation of illness in the body. It's something that seems to be more widely accepted outside of medical circles and by the public. I personally know that after I made some major changes to my life, I improved my health. I changed career, from a stressful, high pressure job in real estate to a part-time position in retail. I cut toxic and negative people from my life and surrounded myself consciously with positive people who enriched my life. Although some major life changes are unavoidable (I flared just after giving birth, for instance) my supportive friends, family and doctors were aware that a flare was imminent and did everything they could to help me when it happened. My gastroenterologist tells me all the time that (since flares are inevitable) his job is to stretch out my remission periods for as long as possible, and I understand that my role is to keep stress and trauma at bay as much as I can.

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A bereaved man suffers a heart attack. An unemployed graduate is plagued by eczema. A divorced woman develops high blood pressure. Are these situations connected... or mere coincidences?

Of all the influences on our health and well-being, chronic stress is among the most ubiquitous. And because the misery of stress is often experienced as much in the body as the mind - tiredness, headaches, tense muscles and the like - common sense tells us that psychological stress leaves us prone to physical illness.

While most people outside medicine happily accept this view, it has been viewed with a much greater degree of scepticism within the field. And that's partly on account of the difficulty in proving exactly how stress might work, not to mention understanding why some people succumb to it but others do not. There are plenty of ideas and intuitive hunches, but rather less incontestable evidence.

But a recent finding from a team led by Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh could finally have revealed a link, offering perhaps the best evidence so far of how stress operates at the biological level. What Cohen thinks stress is doing - a surprise, perhaps, to many of us - is undermining the body's capacity to deal with inflammation.

It's not the only possible stress mechanism; nor is it likely to be the whole truth. But the work represents an important step in understanding the mechanism of stress. It not only adds plausibility to claims about its role in promoting ill health, it's a mechanism that fellow researchers find plausible and convincing.
Seeking proof
Cohen has been working on stress for 30 years, and despite a fair amount of epidemiological evidence accumulated during this time, he and other professionals have been cautious about accepting a link without firm evidence about a possible mechanism. In a 2007 review of psychological stress published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Cohen said: "Despite widespread public belief that psychological stress leads to disease, the biomedical community remains [sceptical] of this conclusion." But speaking now, little more than half a decade later, he takes a rather more positive view. There's been a shift, he says. A plausible mechanism to explain the effects stress will reinforce it.

The issue is how you design an experiment that proves any ill-effects are caused by stress. Up until now, the real hard evidence has had to come from animal studies. "With humans you can bring them to a lab and expose them to stress, and you can get elevations in heart rate and blood pressure," he says. Physiological changes, in other words, that often play a role in disease. But, for ethical reasons what you can't do is give human subjects an illness and see if stress makes it worse.

Well, not quite. An upper respiratory tract infection like a cold is an illness, but it is mild enough to make it ethically acceptable to break the rule, and do human experiments.

Cohen began the research that propelled him to the forefront of this field back in the early 1990s. His approach, originally developed at Britain's (now defunct) Common Cold Research Unit, relied on giving measured doses of cold virus to volunteers and checking to see if they developed symptoms. Before infecting his subjects with the virus Cohen rated their stress levels using standard questionnaires. The higher his subjects' stress scores, he found, the greater the likelihood they would catch a cold.

Further studies showed that the principal enduring and stressful life events that rendered people susceptible to the cold virus were problems with family and friends, overwork, and unemployment. The longer these events lasted, the greater the susceptibility.

British stress researcher Andrew Steptoe, a professor of psychology at University College, London, describes these experiments as probably the most elegant of all the studies of stress and infection done to date. "What you don't usually know under everyday circumstances is exactly when people were exposed to an infectious organism," he says. "There are bugs floating around all the time." Thanks to those experiments, stress levels could be linked precisely to the time of infection.
Prime suspect
While this work confirmed the association between stress and illness, it left Cohen little wiser about the mediating influence. Part of the explanation is quite likely behavioural. Stressed people smoke and drink more. They sleep badly and often take less exercise. All these things have detrimental consequences on your health. But Cohen worked on the assumption that as well as lifestyle issues there are also specific biochemical pathways linking stress and health.

One of the key molecular players in these pathways is also among the most familiar of the body's signalling chemicals: cortisol, a steroid commonly referred to as a "stress hormone". Produced by the adrenal gland in response to stress, the original view of cortisol was straightforward: more stress prompts your body to make more cortisol, and the higher the level of cortisol in your circulation, the worse the outlook for your health.

However, many studies have undermined this simple idea, says Professor Phil Evans, a psychologist at the University of Westminster with a long established interest in stress and cortisol. "Generally, levels of cortisol in naturalistic studies [i.e. those carried out in the real world] do not predict health outcomes strongly, or with any great consistency," he says.

So if cortisol is involved, but not in the simplistic sense of "the more, the worse", what is the nature of the link? Cohen's view is that what matters more than the level of circulating cortisol is the body's response to it. Cortisol molecules exert their effects on the body's cells via a set of specific receptor sites: the glucocorticoid receptors, to give them their full name. When a cortisol molecule attaches itself to a receptor it triggers a chain of chemical events within the cell. Stress, says Cohen, changes the sensitivity of these receptors; they become resistant to the activating effects of cortisol.

One of cortisol's key roles in the body is the suppression of inflammation. This is why its synthetic equivalent, hydrocortisone, is used in treating a range of inflammatory conditions, from eczema to ulcerative colitis. It's Cohen's contention that if the glucocorticoid receptors on the cells of the immune system fail to respond as they should to the presence of cortisol -"glucocorticoid resistance", as it's known - the body's arrangements for keeping inflammation in check break down.

Inflammation in this context refers not to the sudden burst of activity you get following acute infection or injury - a protective attempt to deal with some form of harm to the body and to initiate the healing process - but to a low level elevation of chemical processes that are there all the time. "We know that stress, acutely and chronically, increases inflammation," says Steptoe. If Cohen is right, we now know how. Stress reduces the sensitivity of the receptors (in effect chemical switches) which are supposed to control the level of inflammation in the body.
Detecting resistance
This possibility has actually been under consideration for some time. Cohen himself published some of the early work on glucocorticoid resistance. One study looked at parents of children with cancer: an extremely stressed group. "Our argument was that when you look at people who are under chronic, extreme stress you should find an increase in glucocorticoid resistance. And in comparison with matched control parents that's exactly what we did find." But this work didn't set out to demonstrate any subsequent link between glucocorticoid resistance and illness in those parents.

Back to the common cold. Cohen realised that data from two of his previous studies could be used to test this glucocorticoid resistance theory. In one of these studies he'd assessed 276 volunteer subjects for major stressful life events, exposed them to common cold viruses, and then checked over the next five days for signs and symptoms of a cold. Although he didn't have any direct measurements of the sensitivity of their receptors, he did have details of the proportions of the various types of immune cells present in their blood. Other research has shown that this acts as a surrogate measure of glucocorticoid resistance.

The experiment revealed that prolonged stress is correlated not only with the likelihood of developing a cold, but also with higher levels of glucocorticoid resistance. In other words, the people whose receptors responded inadequately to the cortisol in their blood were the ones who got the colds.

In a second study, Cohen had made direct measurements of glucocorticoid resistance in a group of 79 subjects before exposure to cold viruses. His hope was that it would allow him to predict which of his subjects would catch a cold and which wouldn't. In fact the group wasn't large enough to make a statistically significant prediction about actual colds; but he was able to predict which subjects showed a pattern of biological activity of the kind associated with the symptoms of a cold.

The findings of both studies point in the same direction. What counts is not the amount of cortisol circulating in the body, but how much our cells react to it.
Health predictor
Colds may be unpleasant but, in the scheme of things, they're hardly a big deal. So what of more serious disease? The real importance of the work, says Cohen, lies in its relevance to the many other conditions in which inflammation is a factor. "It's a model that can be applied to many diseases. Cardiovascular disease, asthma, autoimmune disease, diabetes...The regulation of inflammation plays a big role in the progression of all of them."

Steptoe agrees. "People are already interested in inflammation in relation to chronic diseases such as diabetes and coronary heart disease," he says. And Phil Evans too joins the chorus of acceptance. Cohen's conclusions, he says, are "potentially generalisable to a range of other inflammatory illnesses".

At University College London, Steptoe works with the epidemiologist Professor Michael Marmot, who's spent many years studying peoples' health in relation to their socioeconomic class and their status at work. Some of the variation that Marmot has identified is clearly attributable to differences in peoples' material circumstances and behaviour. But when it comes to the health effects of their status in a hierarchy, the forces at work are more subtle.

One possibility is that people fare less well when they find themselves unable to determine their own actions and make their own choices. The crossover with stress is obvious. Professor Steptoe is investigating the cortisol biochemistry associated with their predicament, especially as it affects their risk of heart disease.
Definitive proof
Cohen readily admits that proving his hypothesis will be difficult, at least for now. One of the classic methods of studying a biological system in animal models is to disturb it in some way - stimulate it or inhibit it, for example - and see what happens. "There's no way at present we could directly manipulate glucocorticoid resistance without upsetting all kinds of other systems as well," he says. While animal work showing that chronic stress affects glucocorticoid resistance is persuasive, it is not definitive. "And we can't do this in humans," he adds. "We can't randomly assign people to chronic stressful and non-stressful conditions."

Steptoe agrees. We're reliant on the differing stress levels that people themselves report, he says. "And in an observational study in humans there's always the possibility that some other factor is involved which you can't avoid. For example, it could be that a certain type of person chooses a job that puts them under higher work stress, so any changes aren't necessarily to do with the stress per se, but with the type of person who's attracted to that kind of occupation."

In the meantime, Cohen wants to know if there is evidence that other forms of ill health can be linked to stress-induced resistance in the glucocorticoid receptors. He talks of finding opportunities "to examine the role of glucocorticoid resistance in predicting the onset and progression of other inflammatory diseases, probably in epidemiological studies." And he's not alone. He knows, for example, of another group of researchers planning a study of the role of glucocorticoid resistance in asthma.

There is always the possibility that the definitive experiment will always remain out of reach, in which case stress researchers might find themselves in the position of doctors trying to demonstrate a causal link between lung cancer and smoking. Unable to do the definitive experiment they have had to rely on an accumulation of observational studies, animal experiments, and studies of the physiological mechanisms most likely involved.

After thirty years of exploration, Cohen says he remains undaunted by the prospect that definitive experiment might elude him, and he laughs off any suggestion of frustration. "When you work in chronic stress," he says, "you don't expect to be able to do experiments like that."
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Stress and illness: The decades-long search for a link

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A bereaved man suffers a heart attack. An unemployed graduate is plagued by eczema. A divorced woman develops high blood pressure. Are these situations connected... or mere coincidences? Of all the influences on our health and well-being, chronic stress is among the most ubiquitous.

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In modern times, according to Latour, there is a clear distinction between the natural body and the social world. Today's society therefore tends to diminish the importance of the link between the two. I am certain that societal influences play a major part in many physical illnesses, however, because I have personally experienced it!

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Latour, Bruno We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 1993. Retrieved from https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Latour_Bruno_We_Have_Never_Been_Modern.pdf on 7 August 2016.

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I was astounded when I discovered this term in the readings! You see, I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease almost 20 years ago, and over the years I have become convinced that stress and emotional/mental trauma are the main catalysts for a flare. I just didn't realise it had a name!

Latour says that nature and culture are intertwined, and always have been. Society's distinction between the two has never actually existed, and that culture influences nature and vice versa (Latour, 1993). I can see how this relates to my health when life's stresses manifest themselves physically in my own body. In this collection pad, I want to explore this concept further.

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This article deals with children's experiences of psychosomatic illness, and talks about the stressful experiences which appear to manifest themselves in physical problems such as stomach aches and fatigue.

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Somatoform Disorder: Overview, Somatization Disorder, Factitious Disorders and Malingering

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The somatoform disorders are a group of psychological disorders in which a patient experiences physical symptoms that are inconsistent with or cannot be fully explained by any underlying general medical or neurologic condition. Medically unexplained physical symptoms account for as many as 50% of new medical outpatient visits.

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This is the personal experience of a Crohn's patient, and I found this interesting due to the fact that she was denied care because of the nature of her illness. When her disease was diagnosed as purely biological (physical) she had no problems, but a somatic view of her illness has meant she is no longer eligible for help. Western culture and society definitely draws a distinction between the mind and the body, and refuses to acknowledge that the two may work in unison, with one influencing the other.

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Vent for Somatic Symptom Disorder - Crohn's Disease Forum - Support group and forum for Crohn's Disease, Ulcerative Colitis, and other IBD

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Hi WyoJae So sorry about this. I did a search for so somatic symptom disorder. Seems very Freudian to me, that is bodily symptoms are 'real' but are psychological in origin. I would like to point out that Freud got its wrong quite a lot of the time.

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This is the article which led me to Latour's work. I find that I have the same experiences as the ones in this article - major life changes such as moving house or changing jobs trigger flares of my Crohn's disease. For about ten years, I was oblivious to this, but when I began seriously thinking about what triggers my flares it dawned on me that stressful, traumatic times and events were the catalyst. All of my flares have been within three months of a period of major stress or major life event.