The Physical Effects of Stress On Us

All of us feel stressed out at some point or the other and most of us happen to experience stress very often, especially in our day to day activities. For an instance, you are getting ready for an examination and suddenly you realize that your favorite and lucky pen is nowhere to be seen.


This makes you anxious and you end up getting depressed or explode anger on anyone next to you. This is just a simple event that can cause minor stress for that point of time but there are many negative factors that can cause long term stress in your life, like an unexpected death of dear ones. But we can categorize this form of stress as an unavoidable one and to an extent required for our survival. However, constant exposure to stress can make one’s life traumatic.

What Is Good And What Is Bad

Stress can be broadly classified into two – good stress and bad stress. Stress that brings the fire of motivation can be considered good stress like the stress during the preparation of an exam. This minor stress is considerably tolerable and also encourages a student to perform well in the examination. But when the stress is taken beyond ones tolerance level and also because of other external factors the student may not be able to give his best performance caused by the intense stress. This can further affect the student’s physical and mental health giving way to many psychological and physical effects of stress. To conclude, we can state that, given an instance stress can be either good or bad which mere depends on our perception of the situation.

When a person experiences extreme stress and for a long time, it may leave a person exposed to many mild or acute diseases. So it becomes crucial to be aware of the various effects of stress on one’s physical health and here is a complete guide to understand them.

Mild or Short Term Physical Effects

Exhaustion and lack of sleep are the most common physical effects of stress. Severe sweating, high heart palpitations, minor body aches, recurrent urination or even frequent headaches are some of the symptoms that are shown on ones body due to the effects of stress. If these symptoms are ignored at the first sight, it can further lead to mood swings and frustration. The situation can even worsen when frequent body aches, headache and fatigue is experienced. But all these effects can be only short term physical effects of stress that might not be considered harmful at that point of time. However the physical effects of stress do not constrain themselves to be short termed or minor always.

Acute or Long Term Physical Effects

Continuous exposure to stress can cause many life threatening major or long term effects on our physical body. Our internal organs are at high risk of damage due to stress. Rapid heart beats and rise in blood pressure are two major effects of stress that can further lead to many cardiac problems and stroke.

There are no prominent indicators to high blood pressure that actually turns out to be a silent killer. In fact, there is an unsaid bond between stress and our blood pressure level. Social isolation, depression, melancholy, frustration, anxiety and many psychological disorders are the result of prolonged exposure to stress causing everlasting emotional distress. To top it all these internal disturbances can make the existing physical condition worse further leading to endure many indirect physical effects of stress.