Can Stress Make You Sick?

Unfortunately, stress can make you sick in a variety of ways. Stress will impact your wellness in two areas: your physical health and your psychological well-being. Although not all stress is bad, everyone needs a certain amount of stress to get out of bed in the morning; when it becomes overwhelming, it will negatively impact a person’s life.

Physically, stress affects the body in different ways and can lead to several long-term illnesses. In the short term, people struggling with stressors in their life often experience digestive issues, headaches, and insomnia. Over the long term, stress has been linked to high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease…even cancer.

In terms of your psychological health, unmanaged stress can develop into everything from short-term anxiety to long-term depression. Stress is often a contributing factor to substance misuse issues as well. When people are under a lot of stress, managing their emotions also becomes difficult. This is why when people are stressed out, they will often cry when something relatively minor happens during the day or lash out in anger in situations where they are usually much calmer.

Stress is usually placed into one of two categories: acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is noticeably short-term and will quickly leave once a stressor has passed or been resolved. For instance, you are walking down the street, and a strange dog begins barking at you suddenly from behind a fence. Once you walk away, your body and mind will calm down, and you forget about it. This type of stress is far less dangerous than chronic stress.

Chronic stress is much more long-term and may not be resolved easily. Dysfunctional marriages, financial difficulties, looking for work are all examples of chronic stressors. These types of stressors may last for years. Over time, the impact of these chronic stressors will impact your physical and mental health, as described above.

So stress, more specifically chronic stress, can make you extremely sick. In counseling, people can often learn better ways to manage their stressors more effectively, not to develop more serious health conditions.