[I531]Is Marijuana Bad For Health

Doctors have known for some time that stress can affect your health but we are just now starting to really understand exactly how stress affects the body. A lot of the myths surrounding the subject of stress, such as the fact that stress can give you ulcers, are at last being laid to rest and others are now being confirmed.

A lot of the more obvious affects of stress such as, a rapid heartbeat, hypertension, muscle tension, headaches and digestive problems are easy to recognize and well known, but there are also a few long-term and potentially serious conditions which can result from persistent stress.

Studies which have been conducted at the National Institutes of Health and at other institutions for instance strongly suggest that stress affects the body's immune system. Interestingly enough these very studies have also shown that the affect can be both good and bad.

Given that one definition of stress is that it is simply an individual's 'fight or flight' response to an apparent threat, it can have a good affect. For example, it can, trigger the release of chemicals which help to heal infections arising from bites. This makes perfect sense if you consider just how evolution may have tailored the body's immune system to deal with these events.

However, when this response persists over a long time period, the affects can be harmful and one consequence is that the body's immune system actually becomes less effective leading to a higher susceptibility to infection and a reduced resistance to colds and other virus induced illnesses.

Yet another consequence is an overall feeling of tiredness and sometimes depression. When a person suffers stress for long periods then a feedback loop develops between the cause of the stress (the belief that you cannot solve the problem which is causing the stress) and its affects. This produces a cycle where your belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Chronic stress can also impact your health by compromising you circulatory system. When stress hormones released by the 'fight or flight' trigger are not depleted by {some form of physical activity such as fighting infection|the physical activity of, for instance, fighting infection then they can produce actual physiological stress on the body.

Hypertension hightens the tension on the walls of blood vessels and can result in small tears arising in the blood vessels. When the body reacts to heal these micro-tears, scar tissue can be produced and this lowers the flow of blood through these vessels.

Whenever stress levels reach extremely high levels or persist for a long enough period of time heart attacks can occur. The possibility of heart attack is also raised in older people or in people who carry specific genetic characteristics. With a narrowing of the blood vessels, the heart might be unable to deliver enough blood and oxygen at moments of high demand.

It has also been known for some time that stress can exacerbate the affects of rheumatoid arthritis and this is also now explained by the affect which stress has on the immune system as there is a proven and well documented connection between rheumatoid arthritis and the body's immune system.

It is vital for us all to avoid stress to maintain good health and, luckily, as we gain a clearer knowledge of stress we are also developing some very useful stress relief techniques.