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Alycia Tran

Professor Calhoun

ENG 1201

7 April 2019

How Dangerous Is Stress?

It is normal to get stressed about some things, but is there a limit to it? Stress is very

common, and it can come from many different sources. Stress is the reaction our bodies’ give off

when put in harmful situations. A chemical reaction occurs in our bodies when we feel

threatened. It allows us to take the right course of action to keep us safe. Anything can cause you

to be stressed. There are several causes and factors that come into play when you are stressed.

Everybody feels stressed some time in their lives. Stress can affect you physically, mentally, and

it can affect your wellbeing. Many feel stressed on a day to day basis, or constantly. Being able

to find out if stress is really harmful will allow people to know when to take precautions when it

comes to stress and how to deal with it. There can be many different causes of stress, and every

person deals with their stress in their own way. Being able to manage or deal with your stress can

help you live a happier, healthier and longer life.

Stress is interpreted by everyone differently. The way one person sees stress may not be

the same as another person. Some people can handle stress a lot better than others as well. Our

emotions, thinking ability, behaviors, and physical health are all affected by stress. There is no

part of the body that is immune. Symptoms of stress vary because people handle stress

differently. Symptoms can be vague, and some are similar to ones that caused by medical
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conditions. Because some of the symptoms mimic medical conditions, it is important to keep a

close eye and seek out a doctor when needed.

Not all types of stress are harmful. There are both good and bad stress. According to

Firdaus Dhabhar, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of

research at the Stanford Center on Stress & Health, good stress is considered to be a part of our

survival system. Natural stress can actually protect our immune functions during surgeries. The

article "Good Stress, Bad Stress”, written by Dhabhar, in the Stanford Medicine Newsletter,

explains that there is such thing as good stress. When people think of stress, they relate it to

something negative because stress isn’t exactly the greatest feeling. This article goes to show that

there can be benefits to stress and that not all stress has negative effects.

Even with the small benefits of stress, there are still negative effects that can come from

stress, specifically chronic stress. According to the article "Is Stress Harmful? It's All In The

Way You Think About It”, written by Gene Gincherman, MD, stress can be harmful physically

and psychologically. Stress can lead to several unwanted health conditions. It has been linked to

heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, skin problems, obesity, and depression.

Our mindsets on stress can also affect how harmful it can be. Not only does the amount

of stress in our lives matter, but how we think of it matters too. The University of Wisconsin did

a study in 2012, where they surveyed different people on their stress levels, how they felt about

stress, and how it affects them. They tracked these people for eight years, and found that people

were at an increased risk of dying when they had a lot of stress in their lives, but they were only

at an increased risk when the stress was coupled with the belief that the stress was harmful. The

other people in the study who had a lot of stress in their lives, but did not think it was harmful
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had the lowest risk of death out of everyone in the study. This doesn’t mean to ignore the fact

that stress can be harmful. This means to accept the fact that stress is a normal part of life, and

trying more positive approaches can be beneficial to our health. Gene Gincherman says, “stress

is a fact of life, and how we approach it can make a huge difference”. Trying positive approaches

can be really helpful. Being active can help with your stress a lot. Inactive activities, such as

watching tv, sounds relaxing, but it can actually make your stress worse.

Having a certain level of stress can actually motivate you and help you perform. Getting

stressed over certain things gives your body a boost of energy that ends up making a decision for

you. In the article, “Good Stress, Bad Stress”, the boost of energy given off from stress is

described as the fight or flight response, meaning that the boost of energy you get

controls/affects the way you react to specific events. Our bodies react to stress with physical,

mental, and emotional responses. Stress is a common thing. It’s normal to get stressed. There are

good forms and bad forms of stress. Jennifer Robinson, MD, says that our bodies are designed to

experience stress and to react to it. Good stress keeps us alert and aware for danger, so that we

can avoid it. Stress can also have little health benefits. Small amounts of stress can help

accomplish small tasks that can prevent injuries. An example of this would be slamming on car

breaks to avoid hitting a car. This reaction is from experiencing stress, and our bodies reacting to

it to keep us alive. According to the article, researchers say that small amounts of stress can also

be beneficial to our immune systems. Stress affects your blood pressure and heart rate. Having

stress can improve the way our hearts work and can protect our bodies from infection. The

energy that our bodies produce from the stress causes us to either face it or run away from it,

hence the fight or flight response. This response is good, but we don’t want to always be in the
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fight or flight stage all the time. When you are constantly stressed, or if you get like that

frequently, it can strain your heart and immune system. The high demands stress puts on the

body make the immune system suffer, which makes you more vulnerable to colds and infections.

There is such thing as good stress, and good stress has benefits for our bodies, but there is still

something called bad stress, and bad stress can be very dangerous for us.

The longer you are stressed, the worse it can be for your mind and body. In the article,

"How Stress Affects Your Health.", it states that prolonged periods of stress may make you feel

fatigued, make it harder to concentrate, and it can make you irritable for no reason. Distress can

lead to physical symptoms including ​headaches​, ​upset stomach​, elevated ​blood pressure​, chest

pain, and problems sleeping. Stress is considered to be dangerous when it starts affecting your

ability to live a normal life. Stress can be bad when it becomes continuous, and there is no relief

or relaxation at all. If it is ongoing and there no breaks of relief, this causes our bodies to be

overworked and stress-related tensions can build. Those that stay for awhile can also weaken

your immune system and cause high blood pressure, fatigue, depression, anxiety and even heart

disease. The article, "How Stress Affects Your Body And Behavior" states that stress that’s left

unchecked can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes.

Having a lot of stress can make it difficult for people to control their emotions. Being

stressed can affect you in many different ways. There’s research that shows how little stress is

required for people to lose their cool. A 2013 study by neuroscientists found that small levels of

stress can still impair our ability to control our emotions. In the study, researchers taught several

people stress control techniques. Their hands were then dunked in icy water to put them in a state

of mild stress. While under mild stress, they were shown pictures of snakes and spiders, and they
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couldn’t calm themselves down. The results from the study show that it is possible that even

mild stress, including daily life stress, may impair the ability to use cognitive techniques known

to control fear and anxiety. Stress can not only damage our bodies physically, with poor health

conditions, but it can also affect us emotionally and make it harder for us to control how we feel.

One of the health related issues associated with stress are diseases. Stress can make you

more prone to diseases. There are already some people who are more prone to diseases, and

chronic stress can help promote these conditions. Stress has been linked to illnesses that include

cancer, lung disease, fatal accidents, suicide, and cirrhosis of the liver. At Johns Hopkins

University, researchers discovered that children exposed to chronic stress are more likely to

develop a mental illness if they are genetically predisposed. Chronic stress can also put you at

risk of developing heart disease. Our bodies’ response to stress is supposed to protect us. But, if

it is constant, it can harm you. The hormone cortisol is released in response to stress. Studies

suggest that the high levels of cortisol from long-term stress can increase blood cholesterol,

triglycerides, and blood pressure. These are all common risk factors of heart disease. Heart

problems, such as poor blood flow to the heart muscle can be triggered by minor stress too. This

is a condition in which the heart doesn't get enough blood or oxygen. Long-term stress can also

affect how the blood clots. This increases the risk of having a stroke because it makes the blood

stickier.

Heart disease is the one disease that is most associated with stress. Stress can ruin your

heart, and it can physically damage your heart muscle. According to the American Institute of

Stress, the incidence rate of heart attacks and sudden death increases after major stress inducing

incidents, like hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Stress damages your heart because stress
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hormones increase your heart rate and constrict your blood vessels. This forces your heart to

work harder, and increases your blood pressure. 

There are several factors for the causes of stress and what stress affects. It is not for

certain that stress plays a big role on diseases, but there’s new research that suggests maybe it

affects our bodies’ inflammatory response. A group of researchers led by Carnegie Mellon

University’s, Sheldon Cohen, found that chronic psychological stress is associated with the body

losing its ability to regulate the inflammatory response. The research says that when this occurs,

this is what promotes the development and progression of diseases. "Inflammation is partly

regulated by the hormone cortisol and when cortisol is not allowed to serve this function,

inflammation can get out of control," said Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology

within CMU's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Prolonged stress alters the

effectiveness of cortisol to regulate the inflammatory response because it decreases tissue

sensitivity to the hormone. There is still so much more to be learned about stress, but there is

already a lot of information and studies done that prove how harmful chronic stress can be.

When people talk about harmful stress, they are usually talking about chronic stress that

can affect our health. According to Jennifer Breheny Wallace, there’s research that suggests

minor, everyday stress can be harmful too. Minor stress that’s caused by flight delays or traffic

jams are examples of how something so little could actually be harmful. Having a few things that

make us stressed every now and then is fine, but psychologists say it’s the nonstop strains of

everyday life that can add up. “These hassles can have a big impact on physical health and

well-being, particularly when they accumulate and we don’t have time to recover from one

problem before another hits us,” says California-based psychologist Melanie Greenberg. Daily
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hassles can cause our blood pressure to rise, which puts us at risk for heart disease. Carolyn

Aldwin, director of the Center for Healthy Aging Research at Oregon State University, says “it

can also raise the levels of our stress hormones, a process that affects our immune system, and

can lead to chronic inflammation, a condition associated with a host of serious illnesses,

including cancer”. Stress being harmful does not always relate to death or seriously bad

situations. It can occur whenever, and even small incidents can cause stress. It becomes harmful

when it becomes continuous with no breaks.

The continuous cycle of minor stressors affect our health, but the way we react to it can

also take a toll. In a 2016 study, researchers interviewed around 900 people and asked then how

frequent they experience stress and how severe it is each time. The researchers also tested their

resting heart rate variability, which is the variation in intervals between heart beats. If the results

are high, then it’s a healthy response to stress, but if it’s low, it’s usually associated with

increased risk for heart disease and death. The researchers concluded that how a person

perceived their stress and then reacted to it emotionally is what makes an impact on how stress

affects each person. Sometimes it’s not always about how severe your stress is, but the way we

perceive stress plays an important role.

Stress causes deterioration in everything from your gums to your heart and can make you

more susceptible to illnesses ranging from the common cold to cancer. Some people respond to

stressful situations through nervous tics or by grinding their teeth. Grinding your teeth can do a

lot of long lasting damage to your jaw and wear your teeth thin. People grind their teeth

unconsciously. It’s just considered a bad habit. This bad habit can actually be really bad for you

though. In 2012, a multi-university study linked stress to gum disease. Researchers have also
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concluded that pressure that comes from marriage, parenthood, work, or lack of romantic

involvement were all factors in periodontal disease. Heart disease isn’t the only issue that can

come from stress, but the way people react to it, such as nervous tics, can also cause other health

related problems as well.

Stress reduces your ability to metabolize and detoxify. It can cause you to gain weight.

Studies have shown that the activity of hundreds of genes responsible for enzymes that break

down fats, are negatively impacted by stress. Stress can also increase your toxin burden by

increasing your desire for high fat, high sugar foods. If you think about past times and how

scarce food was, when those people got the chance to eat however much food they could, they

ate as much as they possibly could. This is a similar case to how people react to stress. Some

have nervous tics, but others eat to relieve them of their stress. At the University of Miami,

researchers found that when people find themselves in stressful situations, they are more likely to

consume 40 percent more food than they normally would. If you react to having a lot of stress by

eating through your emotions, it can cause you to gain weight.

Stress affects us all, and there are symptoms of it that can occur from anything. The

symptoms can appear during hectic or crazy situations, such as work and home. Stress is very

common, and it can come from many different sources. It can happen anywhere and anytime.

There are good types of stress and bad types of stress.. Good stress can be motivational, whereas

bad stress brings unwanted health problems. While a little stress is okay, and can actually be very

beneficial, too much of it can wear our bodies down, making us sick, both mentally and

physically.
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Works Cited

Crestani, Belinda. "The Harmful Effects Of Stress." ACUITY. N.p., 2019. Web. 17 Mar. 2019.

Dhabhar, Firdaus. "Good Stress, Bad Stress - Stanford Medicine Newsletter - Stanford

University School Of Medicine." Stanfordmedicine.org. N.p., 2019. Web. 17 Mar. 2019.

Gincherman, Gene. "Is Stress Harmful? It's All In The Way You Think About It - Kaiser

Permanenete Kpproud Mid-Atlantic States." Kaiser Permanenete KPproud Mid-Atlantic

States. N.p., 2019. Web. 17 Mar. 2019.

"Good Stress, Bad Stress - Ulifeline". Ulifeline.Org, 2019,

http://www.ulifeline.org/articles/450-good-stress-bad-stress​.

"How Stress Affects Your Body And Behavior". Mayo Clinic, 2019,

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress-sympto

ms/art-2​ 0050987. Accessed 3 Mar 2019.

Krantz, David, Beverly Thorn, and Janice Kiecolt-Glaser. "How Stress Affects Your Health."

Apa.org. N.p., 2019. Web.

Robinson, Jennifer. "The Effects Of Stress On Your Body." WebMD. N.p., 2019. Web. 17 Mar.

2019.

Wallace, Jennifer. "Even The Small Stresses Of Daily Life Can Hurt Your Health, But Attitude

Can Make A Difference." N.p., 2019. Web. 24 Mar. 2019.