Corey Bland

Mrs. McKoy

English- 2

9/9/13

Stress is Killer

Stress, everyone has it, but what they don’t know is, if left untreated, it can have some                             major repercussions on your health, life and even relationships. I asked my aunt and my mom what happens to them and how they felt as a result of stress. My mom said that when she was stressed, see would sleep too much or sleep too little, she also grinds her teeth in her sleep. She also said she gets headaches and will forget things people said a minute ago. She gets emotional either really angry and yells at everyone or just cries. She mentioned aches and pains and when mad at my dad she stares at the door trying to burn a hole through my dad’s soul. My aunts Symptoms as my mom except with the anger she’s like a miniature hulk. If stress is left untreated, it can have some major repercussions on your health, life and relationships.

Stress isn’t anything new to me at all, I deal with it daily. Heck it took my 5 try’s to figure out what topic to do for this assignment. Due to stress I get really bad migraines like twice a week, to the point where I have to be in a dark, cold, and quite room, and headaches the rest of the week. Stress keeps me up all night, some days I’ll go to bed at 10pm and wake up off and on until 1 in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. I know what I’m about to say is ironic but it’s true, stress makes me procrastinate on assignments because I know how hard the assignment is going to be. Then since I did wait to work on it, I get even more stressed out because it’s due the next day.

While searching for information on stress I found this site, helpguide.org. It gave a ton of information about the physical and emotional symptoms that are caused by stress. A few examples of the cognitive or mental symptoms are: racing thoughts, memory problems, constant worrying. Some emotional symptoms are: loneliness, depression, and being moody. Physical symptoms include: aches and pains, frequent colds, and nausea. I’ll just give you only 2 of the behavioral ones, isolating yourself from others, sleeping too much or too little. One article by the (American Psychological Association, American Institute of Stress) showed a lot of statistics on causes of stress and on what percent of people experienced certain symptoms. It said 51% of people had experienced fatigue or loss or gain of appetite. 44% of people experience headaches and 30% of people had joint or muscle pain.50% of Americans stress comes from money issues and 62% of Americans stress about work, work loads, job security.

 I know these sites and there information is trustworthy because a lot of the information was on other sites more or less. A lot of the information was from medical associations. How it’s guided my topic is that after coming up with doing stress as my topic, I jumped on the PC and started researching. After doing which I saw all the symptoms and realized a lot of them I was experiencing, like an upset stomach, migraines, lack of sleep, and I stay alone all the time.

I’d like to research further and see what could help with stress and see if there are other major health risks besides cardiac arrest. I’d also like to see what you can cut out of like to help resolve some of the stress and some ways to relax. My argument would be that if left untreated stress can kill. The questions I would ask when I researched further would be how does stress kill, what major health issues are caused as a result of stress, and what could be done to reduce stress.                

Work Cited

smith, Melinda, Robert Segal, and Jeanne Segal. "Stress Symptoms,Signs and Causes." www.helpguide.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Sep 2013. <http://www.helpguide.org/mental/stress_signs.htm>.

"How stress affects your health." www.apa.org. American Psychological Association, n.d. Web. 10 Sep 2013. <http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/stress.asp&xgt;.