The Danger of Stress

This article is talking about how stress can affect not only others around you, but can also affect you and your body. When someone stresses, they are thinking about something big that is going to happen or are nervous for something in the future. They are worrying about something that might or might not be in their own hands. When a person stresses over something, say a paper, their work could be affected because they are spending time worrying about the grade or when it's do, then the content and thought of the paper. So, work and the output could be affected by stress. But, stress not only affects the work, it also affects your body in several ways; ways that could be as minor as a cold or major like heart disease or osteoporosis.
OSU psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and Ronald Glaser have spent years researching the affects of stress on the body. Some people believe that stress is just a state of mind, but these two people set out to prove stress can seriously harm the body. In one of their tests, Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser show how stress affects the immune system. Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser chose a group of caregivers who look after spouses or parents that are chronically ailing because thier job is stressful. They also chose a group of people who were very relaxed at the time. Kiecolt-Glaser gave each group flu vaccines and compared their number of anitbodies. 38% of the stressful caregivers had normal anitbody levels and 66% of the relaxed group had normal antibodies. This proves that the antibodies weren't doing a very good job in protecting the immune system and stress is what ultimately put these people at higher risks of infection.
Another experiment was how well the body would heal itself under stress. With the same two groups of people, the caregivers who were stressed, their body took 24% longer to heal than the wounds of the people who were not stressed. So, stress does affect your body in protecting you and healing you. Kiecolt-Glaser said that "stress causes the body to release pro-inflammatory cytokines, immune factors that initate responses against infection." This is where stress can affect your body in major ways. After a period of time, these cytokines build up and can lead to higher risks of heart disease, osteporosis, and two different types of diabetes.
So, the more you stress, the more strain you are putting on your body, which can lead to minor or even major problems. Whether you are stressing about school, or a new job, or even going to college learn ask yourself if it is really worth stressing about. Is worrying about something ,that might not even be in my control, worth risking to seriously hurt my body?

my opinion: I think that this article just shows you a few ways on how stress can really affect the body. Even something as simple as stressing over a homework problem could lead to you having autoimmune problems or diabetes. Stress is something we think about as being not a big deal, that everybody does it. That stress is just something that we believe, but doesn't actually affect us physically. For me, I stress all the time, sometimes without even knowing that I am actually stressing. I always knew that stress could affect my work, but I never actually thought of it as affecting my body. This was a suprise to me and really made me think about what I stress over. Some things are really not worth stressing over, but I do stress because sometimes I don't know what else to do. It really makes me think, is worrying over a certain thing really worth stressing? Is it really worth risking my body to stress over something I might not even be in control of? These types of questions really make you think if stressing is really worth anything, or if it's just a useless thing that we do because it the thing we always know how to do.
-Becca