Skip to main content

Common Signs and Symptoms of Too Much Stress

We all experience stress in our daily lives from different sources: jobs, relationships, finances. And whether you’re dealing with a daily stressor, chronic stress, or a major life challenge like illness or divorce, stress can take a significant toll on you both physically and emotionally. How do you know when you’re dealing with a level of stress that’s unhealthy for you?​
Man wincing with a headache
The answer to this question can be tricky for a few reasons:
  • Wide Variety of Effects: Stress affects the body in many different ways. Some of these are obvious, but others may not be as noticeable or easy to detect until they become more severe.
  • Personal Differences: Different people are affected more or less intensely and in different ways.
  • Ambiguity of Symptoms: The effects of stress often look like symptoms of other illnesses (partially due to the fact that stress lowers immunity and makes us vulnerable to many things), sometimes people mistake symptoms of illness for stress and vice versa.​
  • Habituation: People who thrive on stress tend to feel it as their natural state, making it more difficult to discern stress symptoms until after much of their stress is alleviated.
  • Feeling Too Overwhelmed to Notice Stress: Ironically, when under high levels of stress, people often find it difficult to stop and notice their body’s responses. It seems counterintuitive that someone could be "too stressed to feel stressed," but it does happen.

Common Signs That You're Highly Stressed

While stress affects everyone in a unique way, there are certain factors that are common. If you are experiencing any of the following, it could be a sign that you’re being affected by stress:

Headaches

Certain types of headaches can be related to stress. Tension headaches tend to feel like you have a band wrapped around the sides of your head and that band is slowly tightening. If you’re experiencing more headaches, especially tension headaches, stress could be the culprit.

More Frequent Colds or Flu

There’s an inverse relationship between stress and immunity, meaning the greater your stress levels, the lower the effectiveness of your immune system, generally speaking. This is true for stress that is greater in severity or stress that is more chronic. Decreased immunity means you're more susceptible to everything from colds to more significant health issues, so if you’re under too much stress, you may be getting sick more often.

Sleep Problems

There are many ways that stress affects sleep. Stress can make sleep come less easily and can lead to wakefulness throughout the night. Too much stress can rob you of sleep and make the sleep you get less restorative.

General Anxiety

Anxiety does serve an important function for survival, but if you’re feeling anxious much of the time, it could be because you have too many stressors in your life, or it may indicate a medical condition like generalized anxiety disorder. If you experience an increase in anxiety, you may want to talk to your doctor.

Fuzzy Thinking

Your body’s stress response pumps your body with hormones that make it possible for you to fight or flee quickly. It was built for infrequent stress, however, and stress that is short in duration. When triggered in excess, this stress response can actually cause you to think less quickly.

Feelings of Frustration

f you’re faced with many demands at once, the natural result for many people is increased frustration and irritability. This can lead to more difficulty in relationships as well as in personal happiness. The trick is to find ways to prevent frustration and calm down quickly.

Lowered Libido

Stress can affect your libido in several ways. If you’re too tired for sex, or can’t seem to find the time for your partner, this can be due to stress in your life as well. This lack of sex drive can also create more stress in your romantic relationships, leading to yet another example of poorly managed stress leading to greater levels of stress to manage.
These are just a few of the many ways that stress can affect your body and mind.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Abscess, Bartholin's (See: Bartholin's cyst)

Overview Bartholin's cyst The Bartholin's (BAHR-toe-linz) glands are located on each side of the vaginal opening. These glands secrete fluid that helps lubricate the vagina. Sometimes the openings of these glands become obstructed, causing fluid to back up into the gland. The result is relatively painless swelling called a Bartholin's cyst. If the fluid within the cyst becomes infected, you may develop a collection of pus surrounded by inflamed tissue (abscess). A Bartholin's cyst or abscess is common. Treatment of a Bartholin's cyst depends on the size of the cyst, how painful the cyst is and whether the cyst is infected. Sometimes home treatment is all you need. In other cases, surgical drainage of the Bartholin's cyst is necessary. If an infection occurs, antibiotics may be helpful to treat the infected Bartholin's cyst. Symptoms If you have a small, noninfected Bartholin's cyst, you may not notice it. If the cyst grow
2 comments
Read more

Absence seizure

Overview Absence seizures involve brief, sudden lapses of consciousness. They're more common in children than in adults. Someone having an absence seizure may look like he or she is staring blankly into space for a few seconds. Then, there is a quick return to a normal level of alertness. This type of seizure usually doesn't lead to physical injury. Absence seizures usually can be controlled with anti-seizure medications. Some children who have them also develop other seizures. Many children outgrow absence seizures in their teens. Symptoms An indication of simple absence seizure is a vacant stare, which may be mistaken for a lapse in attention that lasts about 10 seconds, though it may last as long as 20 seconds, without any confusion, headache or drowsiness afterward. Signs and symptoms of absence seizures include: Sudden stop in motion without falling Lip smacking Eyelid flutters Chewing motions Finger rubbing Small movements of both hands Afterwa
1 comment
Read more

How to Develop a Stress Reduction Plan That Works

While the body’s physiological stress response—the fight or flight response—is virtually universal, the way that stress impacts us is as unique to each individual as the events that cause us stress in the first place. Simply put, we all respond to stressful events in our own way, and our responses to stress affect us in ways that are unique as well. Why is this? Stress Triggers We’re all affected differently by life’s events. While extreme events like a physical attack by a violent stranger or the diagnosis of a serious illness produce a strong stress response in virtually everyone, many everyday events on the job or at home will be experienced as stressful by some and exciting, challenging, or even exhilarating by others. What accounts for these differences? Past Experience:  We all carry "baggage," and that affects our current thought patterns and how we conceptualize what’s going on today. These thought patterns impact whether we see something
1 comment
Read more