How stress affects our health

How stress affects our health

Work, family, everyday life: these days, stress is a permanent condition that at some point takes its toll. Because anyone who is constantly exposed to negative stress takes damage to body and soul. These are the consequences!

Many people never get out of stress mode at all. You don't even have to have a double burden with work and family: Permanent work overload and no ray of hope that working hours and the permanently high workload sometimes normalize, drive many people into total exhaustion these days - every second employee now feels threatened with burnout.

Interesting article: Burnout - first aid for stressed mothers

The bad: at some point you just can't switch off anymore and take all the stress with you into your free time. And this also demands a lot from people, because there are often too many obligations on the plan.

Constant stress from work and leisure

You've had a hard day or a hard working week, and friends, family and relatives are already waiting for you? The dog also wants to be taken for a walk, household chores and dinner don't go by themselves either. Then the grandma still wants to be visited and the friends wanted to come over later for a glass of wine: Where do you get all the hours from to cope with all this? Sometimes you want to throw everything away! Overwork triggers stress in us, which is reflected in the following symptoms:

  • high blood pressure
  • a headache
  • Eye flutter
  • Tinnitus and / or sudden hearing loss
  • Heart disease up to and including heart attack
  • stroke
  • insomnia
  • permanent nervousness
  • Loss of libido
  • Difficulty getting pregnant
  • Despondency or depression
  • Back pain
  • Grinding teeth

The list of symptoms that are triggered by stress is long and should not be underestimated. So if you notice that you are approaching a critical limit or have even exceeded it, in which the body is already sending you the first warning signals, you should act urgently.

The difficult thing: Not every person assigns the symptoms to stress in the same way, because every person has a different stress level. Positive stress can even inspire you! But if you feel more and more of the so-called symptoms, then the ripcord has to be pulled. Medicine has sufficiently dealt with stress-related physical and mental illnesses. One of the best-known consequences is the burnout syndrome - it is the increase in “normal” exhaustion: You feel completely burned out due to constant excessive demands. Many people can then no longer even get up, start crying at a simple "good morning" or can no longer do their work at all. 

The highest level of alert exists in the event of stress-related heart attacks and strokes - a light heart attack is a clear alarm signal from the body. You can't ignore that or dismiss it. If you are in this risk mode, you MUST shift down a gear if you want to avoid worse.

Change lifestyle habits and reduce permanent stress

Because many people are "used" to constant stress, they often find it difficult to reflect on themselves or to recognize what needs to change. But this is the first step towards improvement: pause for a moment, take back and analyze the stress. You will recognize that stress factors can usually be divided into two camps: In the things where you cannot do much and in the things in which you can change something quickly.

No quick fix:

If the employee is pursuing a personnel-saving policy and just squeezing his employees, a conversation will be of no use. But you could change jobs. Just consider that overload is the order of the day in many companies. So it is important to consider why it is worth staying or why it is better to leave. Even if a family member is sick or you have parents in need of care, you cannot change anything about this condition. We have to live with some things and try to make the most of them. Here it helps to accept and accept the situation.

Quick solution:

You don't have to have friends and family on your radar every weekend - allow yourself more free time to relax! The household can also be split up and the children can go out with the dog.

Important: Learn to give up too - if the family is used to you always doing everything, then they will also think that this is okay. So that you protect yourself and your health and relax more , it is time to act!

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