Health and Stress

The Article I chose is entitled 10 Ways Stress Can Affect Physical Health. This article was published by Active Beat Magazine. The author is Catherine Roberts whom wrote it October 21, 2016. It pertains to the diverse ways stress affects your physical health and gives you ideas on coping strategies. She also states that a study done by the American Psychological Association shows that roughly seven in ten Americans regularly deal with stress and its physical effects. I chose this article because I can relate to some of the symptoms they state stress causes like depression, anxiety and weight problems, but I believe everyone can relate to at least one.

Number two in her Article was Depression which is also relevant to stress which relates to your emotional, cognitive and behavior etc. In the article she states that it can make you feel burnt out. I can vouch for someone who deals with this that, that is the case I feel its an effort to push myself to do many things and feel exhausted through it all. The author also states that you tend to feel worried about all matters, which for me is true however I would think that would be listed under anxiety and not depression.

There are quite a few other things that she left out under depression that one deals with like having a tough time falling asleep and for me I sometimes have to take a sleep aid to assist with this because my mind runs a mile a minute, but my body is completely exhausted and ready to shut down. The author did state one effective way to deal with stressors is to meditate, and to find a way to identify what causes your distress, so you can possibly eliminate it.

I find the part funny about eliminating stress funny because some stress is caused by family and for us we can't just eliminate family, but we have distanced our self from a few. It's also hard to just eliminate daily life stress like work and things at home that need to be taken care of daily. Those are daily struggles on your health and body like (Hans Selye) (GAS) study alarm, resistance then exhaustion. Each one wreaking havoc in their own way on your immune system.

The authors suggestion of meditation is a great one because you can use concentrative meditation taking your focus off the stressor at hand and putting it elsewhere thus bringing down your heart rate and blood pressure causing relaxation. Herbert Benson provided a study on this as well. Aside from meditation I think that if you take your mind off the stressor and focused more towards things that make you feel good it can relax you. Like for me my relief is singing. I Think that its just about refocusing on something positive.

All though the author does state the odds from a finding that was allegedly done by the American Psychological Association she doesn't provide substantial evidence to support her findings nor is there anyone one cited. Even though I do agree with her statements, she provides nothing to back up her claims which it easy to find now and days. I don't think this author was bias, but I do think she needed to do more research.

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