Stress in unavoidable. The moment you were born into this world, stress is already part of you. Throughout your life, you’ll bump into stress every now and then. Most people have a way to deal with stress, so the occasional bumping does them little harm. For the unlucky few, however, the stress just keeps on piling up. In the long term, the damage could be devastating.
The Terrible Effect of Long-Term Stress
When you find yourself in constant alert all the time, you may already suffer the effect of long-term stress. Ongoing and chronic stress will give you many serious health problems, which include, but not limited to the followings.
Changes in personality
There are too many stories about this one already. People who are stressed at work year after year end up not becoming themselves anymore. It’s as if the prolonged stress has drained all the positivity a person used to have. What’s left is a broken shell of an irritable individual, ready to exploded at the slightest touch. Broken relationships are just around the corner when people can’t find immediate solution to such stressful condition.
Memory loss
The Hippocampus is a part of the brain that mainly deals with memory. Chronic stress has a major effect on this area of the brain. The immediate result is you becoming more forgetful as days go by. You will often forget what you’re trying to do or where do you put things because your short term memory is all messed up.
Shorten your life
This shouldn’t come out as a surprise. When your body is hammered with all kinds of physical and psychological problems, your life expectancy is cut severely. Don’t treat this fact as an attempt to scare you though. It should serve as a friendly reminder to open your eyes and deal with your stress in a healthier manner.
OK, let’s stop for now. There are more scary effect of prolong stress, but those three should be enough to warn you just how serious it is. The question now is: how do you prevent stress from eating you alive?
Many people deal with stress the wrong way. They eat too much, run to alcohol, or drown themselves in work. All those things will only make things worse.
A healthier approach is to exercise, cut coffee and alcohol, eat well, and stay away from tobacco. Whenever you can spare half an hour, lay back and listen to some ambient sound to relax your nerves and calm you down.
