Health of mind and body are intensely related to each other. When someone gets mentally weak, it's assured that there will be some bodily malfunctions. Similarly when someone becomes seriously I'll, there will definitely be some mental issues. There is growing evidence that stress plays an important role in illness & health. Researchers have observed that stress leads to diverse bodily reactions. The heart, the lungs, & the digestive, the endocrine & the nervous system among others, work overtime when people experience stress. When there systems are consistently overloaded throughout long period of a person's life, the likelihood increases that some sort of physical weakness or disturbance will occur.
It makes good medical sense, therefore, to study the personal characteristics & aspects of life that go alongwith strong & persistent stress reactions or that might predispose a person to psychological or physical breakdown. Stress is created when individuals face difficult situations & have to ask themselves, " How am I going to handle this one?" or " Can I do it?". These factors increase stress & the risk of illness. Only some of the people who are biologically predisposed to a particular condition actually fall ill. Others who are equally biologically vulnerable, are able to cope effectively & thus reduce the negative effects of stress on health.
The chance of onset of illness may vary with a number of factors including age, the particular form of illness, & what's going on in the person's life. These interacting factors provide a clue as to why it's particularly impossible to make statements like, " Jones got pneumonia because he had been working overtime for 2 months" or "Smith developed ulcers because she is such a nervous person". Stress causes a variety of physical changes like it stimulates hormonal secretion, activates the autonomic system, brings out biochemical changes & alters the Brain's electrical level. Though everyone have these reactions, strength & pattern of reactions vary with different life.
There is growing evidence of the roles played by personal characteristics & people's past life experiences in how the immune system functions in wound healing & resisting disease agents. Academic pressure & other relatively short term commonplace stressors can provoke changes in a variety of immune system functions that can be important for helth. Chronic stressors like imprisonment, job strain, proximity to danger & unemployment, all have negative effects on the immune system. In general, experiencing negative emotions contributes to immunological irregularities whereas good social support can improve immune system. These findings are important because they strengthen the belief that health really is a biopsychosocial product.
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