Stress is the new smoking

In this fast-paced world, we want everything and we want it now. We spend most of our day chasing deadlines, powering through traffic at peak hours and shoving down whatever food we can manage to get our hands-on.

While a little bit of stress is like grease to help us move forward and motivate us, when we are constantly pushing ourselves to achieve everything, we are under chronic stress. Stress is not something that just affects your mind, it affects your body. When you keep your body constantly under pressure it can lead to various negative health effects like weight gain and lowered immunity.

So how exactly does stress affect your body? Let’s find out!

1. Your skin takes the hit:

Chronic stress can make you age faster, leading to early wrinkles on your skin. Moreover, research has shown that while stress doesn’t cause any skin disease it can exacerbate some skin conditions like acne, psoriasis or alopecia.

2. Weight loss becomes more difficult

We indulge in stressful overeating innumerable times. Stress leads us to make wrong food choices which ultimately results in weight gain. Add to that the time crunch you face in your daily life, which means you exercise even less. Ultimately, stress makes you eat more and move less, and this is definitely not good news if you are looking to shed some weight.

3. Your sleep cycle goes haywire:

You sleep cycle gets distorted as your stress increases. Not only do you sleep less but the quality of your sleep also takes a hit. The more anxious you are, the longer it will take you to fall asleep. Being stressed also tends to wake you up more in the middle of the night.

4. You get tired easily:

Stress can make you feel extremely tired, not just emotionally but physically too.

5. Your heart is at risk:

Long-term stress is bad for our heart too. When we are stress, our body releases adrenaline which increases our heart rate and blood pressure. When this continues for a long duration, we are more prone to heart attack and stroke.

6. Your immunity gets low:

Stress disrupts your immune system. The adrenaline keeps our body in the constant state of fight, flight or fright. Over time your immune system gets tired of being in the constant state of emergency leaving you more susceptible to infections and diseases.

7. It can trigger depression:

Stress impacts your mood in a big way. According to neurologists, stress can actually make hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for the feel-good factor, shrink. Paradoxically, the hippocampus is also responsible for managing stress, but as stress increases, it shrinks in size reducing our ability to deal with stress

Stress is something we all suffer from and yet never talk about. One of the best ways to tackle anxiety is to talk to someone about it. It can be your friends, your family or even a counsellor.

Don’t let stress dictate your life. Talk to a counsellor now. We at https://iamears.com are here to listen. We are an anonymous online support community that helps you share your problems and if not always find solutions, then at least know that someone is there for you, that you are not alone.