Do you rush everywhere you go? Are there too few hours in your day? Do you wake up tired and struggle to sleep despite how tired you feel? Are you irritable or just too tired to do anything – or both?
According to statistics, the top 7 most stressful events are:
Many people experience more than one of these stressful events at a time, which increases the risk for stress related diseases like heart disease, depression or anxiety as well as increased susceptibility to infectious diseases even more. Stress crucially influences who will or will not suffer disease and how that disease will manifest. During stressful times, the body loses its ability to regulate inflammatory processes in the body. Immune function is decreased because the body remains in the high alert fight or flight phase.
Chronic stress creates a vicious cycle of doing our best to survive. Usually our good intentions to eat well go out of the window as we replace healthy foods with convenient or fast foods to accommodate our lifestyles, we spend more time vegging on the couch and not enough time outdoors moving our bodies, and we work longer hours in artificially lit buildings that don’t have a lot of fresh air circulating through them. We survive to work and not work to survive.
The other thing that happens with chronic stress is that we start to store fat, so weight gain becomes a problem. Chronic stress slows down our metabolism in a desperate attempt to conserve energy.
Stress can cause our bodies to over respond or under respond. If you would like to see where you are take my stress assessment:
Tips for dealing with stress
