Stress is a normal part of life, and can be triggered by anything from everyday pressures to traumatic events. But chronic stress can take a toll on your health.
The body’s initial response to stress includes pumping adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream to focus the mind and body for action. But prolonged cortisol exposure can lead to heart disease.
Heart disease
Stress causes your heart rate to quicken and blood vessels to narrow in a “fight or flight” response. While these changes may serve an immediate need, they can take a toll over time, increasing your risk for heart disease and other health problems.
Researchers believe that long-term, chronic stress contributes to inflammation in the arteries that promotes atherosclerosis — the buildup of plaque in artery walls that leads to heart attacks and strokes. In addition, persistent stress can lead you to unhealthy behaviors that also increase heart disease risk, such as smoking, poor diet and inactivity.
A population based, sibling controlled study of Swedish individuals found that clinically confirmed stress related disorders were associated with increased subsequent risk of cardiovascular disease — especially within one year — independent of psychiatric comorbidity.
High blood pressure
One of the most common risk factors for heart disease is chronic stress. This is because when you’re stressed, your body’s fight-or-flight response causes an influx of hormones that cause the heart to beat faster and blood vessels to narrow, increasing your risk for a cardiovascular episode.
Aside from its direct impact on the heart, a high level of chronic stress also increases your risk for heart disease by encouraging you to make unhealthy lifestyle choices, like overeating or smoking. It can also lead to obesity, which, in turn, increases your blood pressure.
Stress can also trigger autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus. And it can exacerbate gastrointestinal disorders, such as irritable bowel syndrome and gastroesophageal reflux disorder (GERD).
Depression
Whether we’re running from a bull or just slammed on the brakes, the body’s response to stress involves a chain reaction that causes muscles to tighten and your heart rate to accelerate. These reactions, called the fight-or-flight response, prepare the body for danger and are necessary to help us survive a dangerous situation. But when this reaction is a constant and does not go away, it can wear on the body.
Chronically high levels of stress increase a person’s risk for a variety of illnesses. It contributes to heart disease by increasing cholesterol levels, and to diabetes by promoting poor eating habits that can lead to obesity. It also promotes depression, and can speed the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by accelerating the buildup of plaque in the brain.
Irritable bowel syndrome
Stress causes the body to go into a “fight-or-flight” response, which means the heart rate speeds up, blood vessels narrow and breathing quickens. When this happens regularly, it can cause damage to your heart, blood vessels and kidneys. It can also make you more likely to overeat, smoke and skip exercise – all of which increase your risk for heart disease.
Stress can also trigger irritable bowel syndrome, which is linked to a disruption of the brain-gut connection. Irritable bowel syndrome can be caused by many factors, including emotional stress, a genetic mutation, or a reaction to certain foods. Studies have shown that exercise can improve symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome and help people cope with stress by regulating the gut-brain connection.
Cancer
While research is unclear whether stress causes cancer, it can make tumors grow faster and spread more rapidly in people who already have cancer. The reason may be that chronic stress activates the brain and body’s inflammatory response, making the body a more hospitable environment for cancer cells. That same connection is seen in other auto-immune diseases, such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and in some autoimmune conditions, like rheumatoid arthritis.
While a temporary increase in heart rate and blood pressure during stress may serve an important purpose (to prepare the body for fight or flee), long-term exposure to high levels of those hormones can cause structural changes to the heart and blood vessels, contributing to cardiovascular disease, according to the American Psychological Association.