How Does Stress Affect My Body?
Stress triggers an automatic response in your mind and body called the "fight-or-flight" reaction. This reaction shifts your body into high gear so it can protect you from the threat.
What Is The Fight-Or-Flight Reaction?
Imagine that you're walking along a quiet street when a mugger suddenly approaches and tells you to hand over your wallet. Immediately, adrenaline and other stress hormones flood your body, giving you the strength to either fight the threat or run from it. These stress hormones trigger various changes in your body:
- Your heart beats faster, your blood pressure rises, your breathing quickens and your muscles tense. As a result, more blood flows to the organs that are critical in dealing with danger — the muscles, brain and heart. Less blood travels to lower-priority organs, such as the kidneys, liver, skin and digestive tract.
- More sugar, fats and cholesterol enter your bloodstream to give you extra energy.
- Blood-clotting elements increase to help prevent excessive bleeding in case you're injured.
- You become more alert and your senses sharpen so you can assess the situation and act quickly.
Few of us confront life-threatening events on a regular basis, but all of us encounter less dramatic types of stress everyday — work deadlines, family conflicts and money hassles, to name a few. In response to these daily strains, your blood pressure, heart rate, breathing and metabolism increase. In other words, ordinary events can trigger the fight-or-flight response. If you don't make adjustments to counter the effects on your body, you'll soon feel "stressed out."
Is Stress More Dangerous For Heart Patients?
Yes. Stress makes your heart work harder, which can worsen your symptoms.
Can Stress Cause Medical Problems?
Possibly. Many researchers believe that intense anxiety can cause life-threatening changes to your heart rhythm (a condition called ventricular fibrillation) as well as a multitude of medical problems.
Some experts believe that over the long term, stress hormones in the body can speed the buildup of fatty deposits (called plaques) in the arteries leading to the heart and brain. Plaque can clog the arteries, causing diseased arteries and slowing blood flow to the heart and brain, and may eventually lead to heart attack and stroke.
Can Stress Cause Chest Pain?
Yes. Stress can keep your heart from getting all the blood and oxygen it needs. (In medical lingo, this is called ischemia.) When not enough blood gets to the heart, you feel chest pain (known as angina). Ischemia is more common in heart-attack patients who experience wide emotional swings over the course of an average day, compared with those who stay on a more even keel.
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Mental & Physical Health 
