Stress can be your friend or your foe. When stress fuels the spark of personal achievement, it can work to your benefit by making you more perceptive and productive, acting as a motivator and even making you more creative. But when stress flames out of control—as it often does for many of us today—it can take a terrible toll on your physical and emotional health, as well as your relationships.
While stress is not considered an illness, it can cause specific medical symptoms, often serious enough to send women to the emergency room or their health care professional's office. In fact, 43 percent of adults suffer adverse health effects from stress, and 75 to 90 percent of all physician office visits have stress-related components, according to the American Psychological Association.
In today's fast-paced world, women are experiencing more stress at every stage of their lives than ever before. Juggling job pressures, family schedules, money issues, career and educational advancement and child and elder-care concerns are only a few of the common stressors confronting women.
Stressors are the external events, including pressures, in people's lives, such as divorce, marriage, children, and work and money pressures. The experience of stress, however, is how you respond to these stressors. One person's stressor can be another person's motivator, and one's response to stressors is the key. You can learn to intervene in terms of how you respond to stressors through relaxation, meditation, some forms of psychotherapy and exercise, among other methods. However, you can also work to reduce the stressors in your life, such as learning to say no to commitments, simplifying your life, leaving a bad job or relationship, etc. Sometimes interventions that are originally designed to simply reduce your stress response and improve coping (e.g., meditation, psychotherapy) can lead you to choose to reduce the stressors in your life because you begin to see what needs to change in your life more clearly.
Working mothers, regardless of whether they are married or single, face higher stress levels—both in the workplace as well as at home. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the U.S. agency responsible for conducting research and making recommendations for the prevention of work-related illness and injury, provides these statistics regarding stress in the workplace:
40 percent of workers reported their job was very or extremely stressful
25 percent view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives
75 percent of employees believe that workers have more on-the-job stress than a generation ago
29 percent of workers felt quite a bit or extremely stressed at work
26 percent of workers said they were "often or very often burned out or stressed by their work"
job stress is more strongly associated with health complaints than stress related to financial or family problems
Stress has been linked with a variety of physical ailments from headache, to symptoms that mimic a heart attack and depression. The balance between stressors and your ability to cope with them, however, can determine your mental health. When the stressors in your life meet your coping abilities, your feel stimulated, engaged and appropriately challenged. Too many stressors in your life, however, that overwhelm your attempts to cope can result in depression or anxiety.
Depression can feel like a pervasive sense of hopelessness, a feeling of wanting to give up, tearfulness, or a sadness that does not seem to go away after a couple weeks. Anxiety can feel like a chronic state of feeling 'keyed up' or 'on edge.' Some people who are depressed and/or anxious have physical symptoms, such as changes in sleep or appetite (too much or too little). Chronic depression and/or anxiety has been linked to other physical problems, such as cardiovascular disease, chronic pain, hypertension and diabetes. If you notice symptoms of depression or anxiety, it is important to get them treated. Effective treatments exist and can involve either brief psychotherapy (even as few as six sessions, depending on the problem) or medication. Your health care professional or mental health professional can help.
Regardless of your physical or mental symptoms, talk about the stress in your life with your health care professional. A thorough assessment by your health care team will help determine the cause of these symptoms. You may find that stress has triggered an illness, such as high blood pressure.
Stress and Your Body
Research indicates that women's biological response to stress is actually to "tend and befriend," i.e., make sure the children are safe and then network with other women; whereas men's biological reaction to stress is to go into the "flight or fight" mode. Studies indicate that the hormone oxytocin is released during stressful events or periods in both men and women.
Estrogen may enhance oxytocin release, while testosterone may diminish it; this may be one reason that women seem to seek social support more often then men when under stress. However, women have also been socialized from an early age to look to their social group, particularly their female friends, for support when under stress, whereas men tend to engage in activities, such as exercise or even using substances, when under stress. During stress, hormones including adrenaline and cortisol flood the body, in both females and males causing:
the body's need for oxygen to increase
heart rate and blood pressure to go up
blood vessels in the skin to constrict
muscles to tense
blood sugar level to increase
blood to have an increased tendency to clot
the body's cells to pour stored fat into the bloodstream
All of this can strain your heart and artery linings, so much so that if you already have coronary heart disease, stress might make you feel chest pain, called angina. The increased tendency for the blood to clot may predispose some people to develop a clot in their coronary arteries, causing a heart attack. The tendency for your bowel and intestinal muscles to constrict, also due to a sudden release of adrenaline, can lead to stomach problems. In addition, it can precipitate a number of mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. Stress doesn't cause these mental illnesses, but it can activate these brain disorders in people who may already be prone to them.
It is important to distinguish between the acute stress response—when your heart beats faster and your breath comes faster, you get the rush of adrenalin—and the chronic stress response, in which you are continually under stress It is really the chronic activation of this stress response that is problematic. It is fine once in a while, but over time, activated repeatedly, causes a 'wear and tear' on the body, eventually resulting in disease. These systems were originally designed (so we think) to help us in emergency situations, such as fleeing an attacking animal, but in modern society, we activate them chronically, which is the real problem.
Stress can cause "toxic weight." Cortisol is a powerful appetite "trigger." That's no surprise if you've found that you eat more—and less-than-healthy food—when you're under a lot of stress. Those extra calories are converted to fat deposits that gravitate to your waistline. Fat deposits around the abdomen—the "apple-shaped" figure vs. the "pear-shaped figure"—are associated with life-threatening illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and cancer. Chronically high levels of cortisol actually stimulate the fat cells inside the abdomen to fill with more fat. As you age, your expanding waistline can be life threatening.
Too much stress can also affect your immune system, weakening it and making you more susceptible to colds, coughs and infections.
Some physical symptoms of stress include feeling anxious, depressed or irritable, muscular tension, headaches and gastrointestinal illnesses, sleeping and eating more or less than normal.
Stress Triggers
You may feel stressed in response to external or internal triggers, such as stressors in your life or your own way of relating to yourself, for example:
trauma or crises
small daily hassles
conflicts or unpleasant people
barriers that prevent you from reaching your goals
feeling little control over your life
excessive or impossible demands from others
noise
boring or lonely work
irrational ideas about how things should or must be; perceiving that life is not unfolding as you think it should
believing you are helpless or can't handle a situation
drawing faulty conclusions like "they don't like me" or "I'm inferior to them," or having unreasonable fears of dire events such as "I'll be mugged"
pushing yourself to excel and/or failing to achieve a desired goal
assigning fault for bad events, for example, placing blame on yourself or on others
realizing you may have been wrong but wanting to be right
overreacting to current stress as a result of intense stress years earlier, especially in childhood
Stress is an individualized experience. What may be stressful to you may not affect someone else. Your past experience, other stressors in your life and even heredity can impact what you experience as stressful.
While stress is not considered an illness, it can cause specific medical symptoms, often serious enough to send women to the emergency room or their health care professional's office. In fact, 43 percent of adults suffer adverse health effects from stress, and 75 to 90 percent of all physician office visits have stress-related components, according to the American Psychological Association.
In today's fast-paced world, women are experiencing more stress at every stage of their lives than ever before. Juggling job pressures, family schedules, money issues, career and educational advancement and child and elder-care concerns are only a few of the common stressors confronting women.
Stressors are the external events, including pressures, in people's lives, such as divorce, marriage, children, and work and money pressures. The experience of stress, however, is how you respond to these stressors. One person's stressor can be another person's motivator, and one's response to stressors is the key. You can learn to intervene in terms of how you respond to stressors through relaxation, meditation, some forms of psychotherapy and exercise, among other methods. However, you can also work to reduce the stressors in your life, such as learning to say no to commitments, simplifying your life, leaving a bad job or relationship, etc. Sometimes interventions that are originally designed to simply reduce your stress response and improve coping (e.g., meditation, psychotherapy) can lead you to choose to reduce the stressors in your life because you begin to see what needs to change in your life more clearly.
Working mothers, regardless of whether they are married or single, face higher stress levels—both in the workplace as well as at home. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the U.S. agency responsible for conducting research and making recommendations for the prevention of work-related illness and injury, provides these statistics regarding stress in the workplace:
40 percent of workers reported their job was very or extremely stressful
25 percent view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives
75 percent of employees believe that workers have more on-the-job stress than a generation ago
29 percent of workers felt quite a bit or extremely stressed at work
26 percent of workers said they were "often or very often burned out or stressed by their work"
job stress is more strongly associated with health complaints than stress related to financial or family problems
Stress has been linked with a variety of physical ailments from headache, to symptoms that mimic a heart attack and depression. The balance between stressors and your ability to cope with them, however, can determine your mental health. When the stressors in your life meet your coping abilities, your feel stimulated, engaged and appropriately challenged. Too many stressors in your life, however, that overwhelm your attempts to cope can result in depression or anxiety.
Depression can feel like a pervasive sense of hopelessness, a feeling of wanting to give up, tearfulness, or a sadness that does not seem to go away after a couple weeks. Anxiety can feel like a chronic state of feeling 'keyed up' or 'on edge.' Some people who are depressed and/or anxious have physical symptoms, such as changes in sleep or appetite (too much or too little). Chronic depression and/or anxiety has been linked to other physical problems, such as cardiovascular disease, chronic pain, hypertension and diabetes. If you notice symptoms of depression or anxiety, it is important to get them treated. Effective treatments exist and can involve either brief psychotherapy (even as few as six sessions, depending on the problem) or medication. Your health care professional or mental health professional can help.
Regardless of your physical or mental symptoms, talk about the stress in your life with your health care professional. A thorough assessment by your health care team will help determine the cause of these symptoms. You may find that stress has triggered an illness, such as high blood pressure.
Stress and Your Body
Research indicates that women's biological response to stress is actually to "tend and befriend," i.e., make sure the children are safe and then network with other women; whereas men's biological reaction to stress is to go into the "flight or fight" mode. Studies indicate that the hormone oxytocin is released during stressful events or periods in both men and women.
Estrogen may enhance oxytocin release, while testosterone may diminish it; this may be one reason that women seem to seek social support more often then men when under stress. However, women have also been socialized from an early age to look to their social group, particularly their female friends, for support when under stress, whereas men tend to engage in activities, such as exercise or even using substances, when under stress. During stress, hormones including adrenaline and cortisol flood the body, in both females and males causing:
the body's need for oxygen to increase
heart rate and blood pressure to go up
blood vessels in the skin to constrict
muscles to tense
blood sugar level to increase
blood to have an increased tendency to clot
the body's cells to pour stored fat into the bloodstream
All of this can strain your heart and artery linings, so much so that if you already have coronary heart disease, stress might make you feel chest pain, called angina. The increased tendency for the blood to clot may predispose some people to develop a clot in their coronary arteries, causing a heart attack. The tendency for your bowel and intestinal muscles to constrict, also due to a sudden release of adrenaline, can lead to stomach problems. In addition, it can precipitate a number of mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. Stress doesn't cause these mental illnesses, but it can activate these brain disorders in people who may already be prone to them.
It is important to distinguish between the acute stress response—when your heart beats faster and your breath comes faster, you get the rush of adrenalin—and the chronic stress response, in which you are continually under stress It is really the chronic activation of this stress response that is problematic. It is fine once in a while, but over time, activated repeatedly, causes a 'wear and tear' on the body, eventually resulting in disease. These systems were originally designed (so we think) to help us in emergency situations, such as fleeing an attacking animal, but in modern society, we activate them chronically, which is the real problem.
Stress can cause "toxic weight." Cortisol is a powerful appetite "trigger." That's no surprise if you've found that you eat more—and less-than-healthy food—when you're under a lot of stress. Those extra calories are converted to fat deposits that gravitate to your waistline. Fat deposits around the abdomen—the "apple-shaped" figure vs. the "pear-shaped figure"—are associated with life-threatening illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and cancer. Chronically high levels of cortisol actually stimulate the fat cells inside the abdomen to fill with more fat. As you age, your expanding waistline can be life threatening.
Too much stress can also affect your immune system, weakening it and making you more susceptible to colds, coughs and infections.
Some physical symptoms of stress include feeling anxious, depressed or irritable, muscular tension, headaches and gastrointestinal illnesses, sleeping and eating more or less than normal.
Stress Triggers
You may feel stressed in response to external or internal triggers, such as stressors in your life or your own way of relating to yourself, for example:
trauma or crises
small daily hassles
conflicts or unpleasant people
barriers that prevent you from reaching your goals
feeling little control over your life
excessive or impossible demands from others
noise
boring or lonely work
irrational ideas about how things should or must be; perceiving that life is not unfolding as you think it should
believing you are helpless or can't handle a situation
drawing faulty conclusions like "they don't like me" or "I'm inferior to them," or having unreasonable fears of dire events such as "I'll be mugged"
pushing yourself to excel and/or failing to achieve a desired goal
assigning fault for bad events, for example, placing blame on yourself or on others
realizing you may have been wrong but wanting to be right
overreacting to current stress as a result of intense stress years earlier, especially in childhood
Stress is an individualized experience. What may be stressful to you may not affect someone else. Your past experience, other stressors in your life and even heredity can impact what you experience as stressful.
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