Stress Management

Everyone experiences stress regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic class, or geography. Stress is a normal, hard-wired reaction in your body to a perceived threat, either physical or psychological. We have developed these natural stress responses over time as a way to provide our bodies with the required energy and physiological reactions to either confront or flee from a perceived danger, called the flight-or-fight response. During a stressful event, the body surges its production of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which quicken respiration, raise blood pressure, increase heart rate, and moves blood into the large muscles, preparing you to either fight or evade. While under stress, the parasympathetic nervous system in the body is slowed down or stopped to allow the body to focus on addressing the threat or challenge. Normal stress reactions are not always a negative thing. Stress can help give us the drive and energy to confront a physical threat, react to avoid an injury, work a little harder to meet a deadline, or drive us to play better in a competitive sport.

While stress is a normal, instinctual reaction, frequent or chronic stress can significantly affect your long-term health. The American Psychological Association (APA) has defined three types of stress:

Acute Stress: A common type of stress, characterized by short-term pressure, anger, anxiety, or fear. Due to the short duration, this type of stress does not have long-term health risks and is highly treatable.
Episodic Acute Stress: A longer-term, more consistent form of stress characterized by prolonged episodes of worry, anger, anxiety, pressure, or fear. This type of stress is commonly experienced by the “type A” personalities, people with excessive competitive drive, and chronic worriers. This form of stress can have lasting health effects and might require more aggressive forms of treatment.
Chronic Stress: A consistent, unrelenting form of stress that can have long-term effects on both health and personality. This type of stress can be seen in people living in poverty, struggling with chronic pain or illness, dealing with an assault or war (post-traumatic stress), coping with a dysfunctional relationship, and other significant problems. This form of stress wears on people—both psychologically and physically—and can have profound health effects.

According to a recent survey by the APA, more than 40% of all U.S. adults say they lie awake at night because of stress and studies have shown that there is a strong link between stress and insomnia. Prolonged exposure to stress can place you at an increased risk for developing significant health problems, including heart disease, depression, obesity, as well as digestive, sleep, and memory problems. Genetics may play a role in how a person reacts to stressful events. Studies have shown that overactive and underactive stress responses may be rooted in slight genetic differences. Another possible factor in our stress reactions may come from exposures during childhood. Children exposed to extremely stressful events, such as abuse, may be more vulnerable to stressors as adults.

The body’s stress response is meant to protect us from danger and alert us to make changes in our life. Careful and thorough monitoring of stress, lifestyle, and overall health can be invaluable for people struggling to get better control over their lives. HealtheHuman provides many features to track stress levels, influencers of that stress both positive and negative, symptoms, sleep, and other important health indicators. Our integrated suite of health trackers make it is easy to track and analyze stress and how it is impacting your health.

Key Health Information to Track for Managing Stress

Track Your Causes and Levels of Stress

Controlling your stress starts by knowing the cause, frequency, and duration of your stressful episodes. For most of us, there are a number of different influencers in our lives that can result in high levels of stress, such as relationships, finances, work, and illness. Often times, multiple factors contribute to periods of high stress, like the loss of a job while struggling with relationship problems. HealtheHuman’s Stress Tracker helps you keep detailed daily records of your stress level by hour for each of your influencers. You can also create your own categories, giving you the flexibility to track any type or source of stress you want. Analyze your stress levels using a powerful set of charting and report tools.

Monitoring Stress-Related Emotions

The hormones released while under stress often increase feelings of anger, irritability, anxiety, or depression. Especially with acute stress, it is common for people to get over aroused, short-tempered, anxious, irritable, and tense. The Mood Tracker helps you track changes in your emotions for each hour of the day. Comparing increased stress levels from a specific source to the type of emotional response can help reveal triggers, escalations, and potential ways to prevent or avoid those episodes.

Stress Can Significantly Impact Your Sleep Patterns

One of the most common symptoms of stress is a disruption in your sleep patterns. The worry, anxiety, and anger often linked to stressful events can make it difficult to fall asleep. Your dreams can also be affected by stress, causing more nightmares and negative feelings that could cause you to wake up. Beyond the psychological impact, your body’s physical response can also interrupt your ability to get quality sleep. Increased amounts of adrenaline and cortisol can cause muscle tension, elevated heart rate and breathing, and heightened alertness, which can all counteract your attempt to fall sleep. Sleep is an essential part of being healthy, and trouble sleeping can quickly manifest into health conditions. You can keep a detailed daily sleep log using the Sleep Tracker feature. Keep track of your sleep times, duration, quality, restfulness, nightmares, interruptions, and much more. A variety of charts, reports, and analysis tools help you compare your sleep behavior with your stress levels and other symptoms.

Learn How Your Daily Schedule Might Affect Your Stress Levels

Often times stress is brought on by being rushed and overwhelmed with tasks, errands, deadlines, and the demands of daily living. We don’t always realize how busy we are until we write down all of the commitments, chores, appointments, meetings, and other things that are taking our time and attention. Many times treating stress includes acknowledging being overloaded and working to either reduce or eliminate the activities that are contributing to the problem. Simple changes, like having a spouse go grocery shopping or changing your work hours to avoid frustrating traffic jams, can have a measurable improvement. The Calendar, Schedule History, Journal, and Quicktags features can help you track a wide range of activities and appointments that could be at the root of your stress, or at least help reduce your overall stress levels and help you find more time to relax.

Get It Out With a Daily Journal

Writing can be very therapeutic and revealing, especially for coping with stress. Expressing you feelings in a private, unfiltered way with a diary or journal can help you work through emotions, cope with anger and frustration, and even help reveal some unknown insights into your reactions. While it can be beneficial to talk to family, a close friend, or a counselor about your stress, there can be real benefits to writing out your feelings knowing they are only for you. If you are working with a counselor or therapist to help manage your stress, you can also use these journal entries to capture your feelings to share with them later. The Journal feature lets you keep a daily diary, including options to mark confidential entries that never show up on any reports you create to share with your health advisors.

Keep Track of All Your Medications

Sometimes, relaxation techniques and lifestyle changes are not enough to control stress levels. There are a number of prescriptions that can help you manage your stress levels or treat some of the symptoms of chronic stress. It is important to keep accurate and detailed records of all your prescriptions as well as your use of medications. The Medication Tracker in HealtheHuman includes a complete database of all FDA approved medications, including those prescribed to treat stress. With this feature, you can setup your prescriptions and easily log your medication usage. When combined with the other tracking tools, you can create charts and reports of changes in your stress levels since starting a new prescription, starting treatment, or making a lifestyle change.

Track Blood Pressure Spikes

Increased blood pressure is one of the body’s natural responses to stress. For people dealing with long-term stress, the regular elevation of your blood pressure can increase your risk for cardiovascular conditions, including hypertension. Exposure to high levels of stress can also cause heart palpitations and a rapid pulse. Tracking your blood pressure on a regular basic can be an important part of monitoring the effects of stress on your body. The Blood Pressure Tracker helps you log all of your readings, including systolic, diastolic, pulse, pulse pressure, pulse arrhythmias (PAD), and mean-arterial pressure (MAP). Chart changes in your blood pressure throughout the day or over time and create PDF reports of your readings to share with your doctors.

Watch Out for Emotional Eating

Food is often used as a way to comfort or sooth the negative emotions you experience when under stress, referred to as “emotional eating.” Cravings for specific types of foods are often linked to different emotions. Being under regular stress can increase your tendency to eat more foods that are high in calories, fat, salt, and sugar. Emotional eating can result in unintentional weight gain and poor dietary habits. Keeping a daily food diary can help you watch what you are eating and learn what foods you tend to reach for when you are feeling stressed out. You can also look for stimulants like caffeine that may be making your symptoms worse by increasing your anxiety levels or interfering with sleep. The Diet and Nutrition Tracker helps you track all of the foods and beverages you consume throughout the day, including a number of analysis, charting, and reporting tools to help understand your eating habits.

Log Bowel Habit Changes

One of your body’s responses to stress is to suppress the functions in the parasympathetic nervous system, which include digestion, urination and the bowel function, sexual arousal, salivation, and the production of tears. Exposure to chronic or frequent stress can impact the digestive system, causing bouts of diarrhea, constipation, and difficulty urinating. The Bladder and Bowel Tracker helps you keep track of urination and bowel movements, including flags to mark periods where stress might be causing problems.

Stress Related Health Conditions

Prolonged untreated stress can result in a number of serious health conditions, including anxiety, insomnia, muscle pain, hypertension, and a weakened immune system. Studies have also shown that stress is a contributor to the development of major illnesses, including heart disease, depression, and obesity. Keeping track of all your health conditions can provide valuable insight to doctors and therapists who are helping you reduce your stress levels. Being diagnosed with one of these conditions or other illnesses might be an indication that stress management is an important part of your course of treatment. The Condition History tool in HealtheHuman helps you track all of your current and past health conditions, including a number of reporting options to make it easy for you to share this information with your advisors.

Stress Can Interfere with Memory and Concentration

High levels of stress can have a significant effect on your memory and concentration levels, which might make coping with situations more difficult. Prolonged exposure may affect performance in your career or sport, as well as impact your relationships. The Symptom Tracker and Quicktag Tracker provide options to log memory and concentration issues.

Track All Your Symptoms of Stress

Stress can affect nearly every system in the body. A few of the other common symptoms of stress include heartburn, acid reflux, flatulence, dizziness, headaches, cold hands or feet, shortness of breath, chest pain, sweaty palms, back pain, jaw pain, and muscular tension. The Symptom Tracker helps you keep a daily log of all your symptoms, including their severity levels throughout the day. You can analyze your symptoms using a number of charting and reporting functions.

The Impact of Stress on People with Diabetes

Increased stress hormones can impact the effectiveness of insulin and ultimately impacts blood sugar. Prolonged stress can cause higher blood glucose levels, which is a concern for anyone managing diabetes. Physical stress, such as from illness or injury, also impacts blood sugar, causing higher blood glucose levels for people with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. For type 2 diabetics, stress reduction is an important part of managing your condition because stress blocks the body from releasing insulin. People with type 1 diabetes don't make insulin, so stress reduction doesn't have this effect. There are a number of ways HealtheHuman can help you manage diabetes. Click here to learn more about diabetes management.

Other Things You Can Do to Help Manage Stress

Get Involved in Fun and Fulfilling Activities

One of the best ways to treat stress is to have fun or do something fulfilling like volunteer work or helping a friend. Laughter releases hormones that counteract the effects of stress. Having fun, going to see a comedy show, or surrounding yourself with people that make you laugh and feel good can do a world of good for managing stress. Find other people with similar interests and get involved in fulfilling activities.

Use Exercise as a Stress Reliever

Muscle tension is common when you are under stress, which can lead to joint pain and heighten anxiety levels. Exercise is a great way to relieve this tension and can significantly improve your mood. Incorporating regular exercise and stretching routines into your daily schedule can help manage stress. Physical activity increases the body’s production of endorphins, which increase positive feelings and counteract many of the negative effects of stress.

Make Time for Sex

One of the effects of stress is a reduced libido or sex-drive because of the suppression of the parasympathetic nervous system. However, sex, orgasm, and positive physical contact can all work to counteract and alleviate many of the symptoms of stress. Studies have shown that people are more resistant to the effects of stress if they have regular sex. Like exercise, sex also releases endorphins and other feel-good hormones that can help you relax. While it might be hard to overcome the lack of sex drive when you are stressed, if you can make time for sex, it can go a long way in helping you manage your stress.

Learn and Practice Relaxation

Many people don’t know how to relax. In some ways, relaxation is like learning to dance or play a sport. It requires technique and practice to get good at it. There are a number of things you can do to help your body relax and counteract the effects of stress including breathing exercises, visualization, meditation, yoga, and tai chi. Even simple things, like taking ten full, deep breathes can increase oxygen levels in the blood and help the body relax. Try learning relaxation techniques and practice them so they are effective when you need them.

See Your Doctor

Let your health advisors know if you are having difficulties with stress. Your doctor or therapist may have helpful suggestions for dealing with stress, from deep relaxation techniques to exercises to loosen up muscles where you hold tension. There are also medications and other medical treatment options available if your stress levels are affecting your health. It is important to keep your appointments with your doctor and to provide as much detail as possible to make their treatments and recommendations the most effective.

Talk About It

If you need someone to talk to or want to learn new tools and techniques to control your stress, consider seeing a therapist or counselor. There are a number of support groups to help people dealing with chronic stress. Talk to your doctor about what options are available to you in your area.

Other Resources

American Psychological Association, Stress

American Psychological Association, Understanding Chronic Stress

Medical Disclaimer: All information on this site is of a general nature and is furnished for your knowledge and understanding only. This information is not to be taken as medical or other health advice pertaining to your specific health and medical condition.