Unhealthy Responses to Stress and How These Bad Habits Affect You
Here Are 5 Of The Most Common Bad Habits:
By
Elizabeth Scott, M.S., About.com
Updated: December 31, 2008
About.com Health's Disease and Condition content is reviewed by the
Medical Review Board
If you tend to deal with stress in less-than-healthy ways, you are compounding the
negative impacts of stress on your health by exacerbating the stress levels and creating new problems in your life and health. The following are some common unhealthy ways of coping with stress, along with some of the negative effects of each, and ideas on how to curb or change the bad habit itself or lessen its impact.
Bad Habit #1 - C
onsuming Too Much Caffeine:
Multitudes of people enjoy a daily caffeine intake, as evidenced by the extreme popularity of Starbucks and other coffee houses. And while the occasional coffee isn’t going to do you great harm, it’s important to remember that caffeine is, in fact, a drug, and it’s possible to have a full-blown caffeine addiction. More likely and common, however, is caffeine dependence, where people use caffeine to jump-start their energy in the morning, use it throughout the day to stave off a ‘caffeine crash’, and then find their
sleep disturbed by caffeine, causing them to wake up tired and need the caffeine jolt to get going again the next day. As the cycle continues,
caffeine affects stress levels as well. If this sounds a little too familiar, here are some resources to help
kick the caffeine habit.
Bad Habit #2 -
Smoking:
For smokers, a cigarette can feel like a good stress reliever. In fact,
during times of stress, a cigarette feels almost necessary, and quitting the habit can seem virtually impossible. (Due in part to physical addiction and in part to habit and other social and lifestyle factors, it’s been said that quitting smoking is as difficult as quitting heroin!) Unfortunately, we all know that cigarettes can be costly—financially speaking and especially health-wise—and because smoking creates much more stress than it alleviates, it’s more than worth it to kick the habit. For help, visit the
Smoking Section of the
Unhealthy Behaviors resource category on this site.
Bad Habit #3 -
Drinking In Excess:
Many people find that a glass of wine can be a good way to unwind at the end of a stressful day, and most physicians and researchers agree, citing studies that show that red wine has benefits for heart health. However, drinking can be a slippery slope, as excessive drinking can cause problems in virtually every area of a person’s life, causing much more stress in the long run. If you are one who has trouble limiting
alcohol consumption to one or two drinks, and even if you can drink very moderately, but find that this is your only regular stress management practice, it would likely be in your best interest to pursue other forms of stress relief. For more on alcohol consumption, see the
Alcohol Section of the Unhealthy Behaviors resource category. For additional ideas on stress relief practices, here’s a long and varied list of
stress relievers.
Bad Habit #4 -
Compulsive Spending:
People have many ways of relieving stress or of filling a void inside themselves. While buying yourself a
nice gift once in a while can be a nice pick-me-up, and an effective
self care strategy, compulsively buying things to relieve stress or feel good about yourself, spending money you don’t have on things you don’t need, can only cause more
financial stress in the long run, and cause feelings of shame, a
cluttered home, and add to the stress you were trying to alleviate.
Bad Habit #5 -
Emotional Eating:
Most of us let our friends Ben & Jerry help us reduce stress with ice cream on occasion (or at least most of the people who took this
poll on emotional eating said they did), but if eating the wrong things becomes a main coping mechanism for stress, it can lead to compromised health, excessive weight, and additional stress stemming from these effects. A poor diet can cause additional stress also by leading to blood sugar imbalances that make stressful situations seem more overwhelming. If you find that stress leads to poor dietary habits because of emotional eating, or for other reasons (like you’re just too busy to cook healthy dinners at home), you can learn to adapt healthier eating habits with these resources.
Additional unhealthy responses and bad habits include
self sabotage and lashing out at others, working to the point that you live an
imbalanced lifestyle, and other things. For more help with bad habits and mild to moderately unhealthy responses to stress, visit the Unealthy Behaviors section, read the
Stress Relief Game Plan, and take the free e-course on Living a Low Stress Lifestyle. I also highly recommend this article on maintaining healthy habits!
MY THOUGHTS
Stress relief strategies can indeed lead to more stress - if you're using the wrong
techniques. Caffeine causes insomnia and lack of sleep adds up to stress since your human systems failed to regenerate. Smoking (ouch) clouds your thoughts, causes headache and leads to more health problems. When you drink, you tend to forget the stressors for awhile but that's about it. You wake up with a humongous hangover and you get more stressed trying to remember what crazy things you did while intoxicated. Well, uncontrolled eating, we all know where that would lead us. And a sure fire way to get more stressed. Eating is definetely a no-no when you're trying to relieve stress. Now,shopping! This doesn't seem harmful does it? especially if you have tons of money. But when we buy what we don't need and buy what we can't afford then we're in big trouble. First, because the extra, unnecesary, unplanned
expense will catch up with us. But more importantly, unwise spending is not a good
stewardship. In truth, all of these "bad" stress relievers are "bad" examples of
stewardship. Everything we have are God's gifts and we were commanded to take care of everything we own. The best stress reliever of all is to pray - constantly, unceasingly. Who else can give us
comfort from stress but the One who loves us the most.
