SAH - Stress and Health Lesson
Stress and Health
Stress can lead to illnesses like headaches, and it can make you more vulnerable to disease. When your body is aroused to fight against a stressor, it uses energy that it might otherwise use to fight illnesses or repair tissue, leading to stress-related vulnerability. This makes a person less likely to be healthy. So while stress itself does not cause illness, it does often make people more likely to become ill.
While it's impossible to eliminate stressors from life, it is possible to choose healthy responses to stress in order to avoid many of the health consequences of extreme, prolonged stress.
Discover healthy responses to stress below:
Explore each section in the tabs below to learn more.
Optimist
You can choose to look on the bright side.
Choose to be an optimist. This might take some practice, but the health rewards are worth it. While a pessimist assumes that a bad situation will last forever and takes all the blame for the bad situation. An optimist has another way of assessing the situation. An optimist believes things will get better and does not accept all the blame for every bad thing that happens. The next time you get a bad grade or have a fight with a friend, consider rethinking that happened. Will you assume (like a pessimist) that you're someone who won't ever be able to maintain good grades or good relationships? Or will you assume (like an optimist) that life has hard times but things will get better? Optimistic thinkers are less likely to suffer from heart disease, high blood pressure, and a host of other physical issues.
Exercise
You can regularly engage in at least 20 minutes of aerobic exercise.
Choose to be active. Regular aerobic exercise increases the quality of your daily life and helps you live longer. Just twenty minutes leads to increased mood and alertness, increased ability to fight illness and less anxiety.
Relationships
You can develop and maintain relationships with friends and family members.
Choose to make and keep friends, and treat your family members like you care about them . Researchers have found that social support increases the immune system, reduces blood pressure, and reduces stress hormones. People who have close relationships visit the doctor less often, report fewer illnesses and live longer than those who do not have any close relationships.
Religion
You can regularly partake in some type of religious community.
Almost any religious community will do.
Regular attenders of a religious community live longer and deal with stress better than those who are non-attenders. Maybe it's the social support, the incentive to use self-control, or the decreased stress that comes with having a specific world view, but religious community members reap the benefits.
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