As individuals, we can react in both unique and partly common ways to long-term stress. While some persons react primarily with psychological symptoms, such as anxiety, irritability, and low patience, others react more physiologically with digestive issues, migraine and body aches, etc.
The following text, translated from a Finish health website, gives a great overview of how we can all react to chronic stress through three main types of symptoms:
“Although stress is a psychological experience, many of its effects are physical. Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system and prepares the body for a threatening situation as a fight or flight reaction. A stressed person’s body is on constant alert, and if this condition becomes prolonged, it leads to many different physical symptoms. Typical stress symptoms include tension in the neck and shoulders, headache, dizziness, high blood pressure, heart palpitations, nausea, abdominal discomfort, recurrent flares, and back pain.
People can be roughly divided into three groups according to how they react to stress. Some people react to stress mainly psychologically and the symptoms consist for example of sleep disorders, fatigue, and impaired life habits. For these people, it is usually easy to recognize stress and understand the symptoms, for example symptoms with congestion. In the other group, however, stress causes physical symptoms, such as aches or pain in arms and legs. Since it may be difficult to perceive the root cause as stress, only the physical conditions and not the actual root cause may be treated. The third group includes people who do not react to stress in any particular way. Their performance level may drop, but they will not have any mental or physical health problems.”
(Source: Translated from the Swedish site: https://www.yths.fi/sv/halsokunskap_och_forskning/halsodatabanken/112/stress)
