Stress can affect your life severely and in many different ways. For example, stress can affect your physical and psychological health, which means that these can deteriorate quickly. Furthermore, stress can lead to more severe problems such as depression and burnout.
Stress: the influence on your body?
While you would think that stress is something psychological, it can most definitely have a large influence on your body. First of all, stress frequently leads to muscle tension. This muscle tension in turn can lead to annoying pains as well as headaches. People with chronic headaches often suffer from tension headaches, which are caused by muscle tension. Stress can thus influence this type of headaches a lot. Beyond this, stress can disrupt your rhythm, which in turn can lead to fatigue, as well as physical vulnerability. This way your immune system is lowered if you sleep poorly for some time, but also if you exhaust your body by, for example, stressing about all tasks which you need to do that day. Stress can also have an influence on your circadian rhythm, which means you can wake up tired and stressed.
Stress: the influence on your mind?
Besides the influence on the body, stress can also have severe consequences on your psychological wellbeing. For example, stress can introduce worrying. Worrying is a sped-up version of thinking in circles, where you keep getting stuck on the same subject without finding a solution. If this keeps up for a long time, this can lead to psychological exhaustion, which in turn can lead to depression and burnout. Stress can also make you have more trouble with focusing and remembering things, which can make your work, housework and other daily tasks much more difficult. If you are stressed, these tasks will take more time too, which in turn can lead to more stress.
Stress solving? How do you treat stress?
15 Minutes 4 Me is an online self-help program, which daily guides you from home in treating stress and its psychological and physical consequences. Thanks to solution- and behavioral therapeutic techniques, you learn how to deal in a healthy way with stress, how to work on symptoms of stress, and how to prevent stress in the future.
Stress test! Take the free stress test here!
Would you like to know to what extent your stress affects your daily functioning and which psychological/physical consequences of stress you experience? Then take the free stress test here!