effects of stress on the body.
A little stress can be motivating. But when stress becomes constant, it takes a toll—affecting sleep, digestion, immunity, and mood. Over time, the body stays stuck in “on” mode, unable to fully rest or recover. The good news is that the same body that holds stress also knows how to release it. Research now shows what ancient traditions have always known: movement, rhythm, breath, and creative expression help regulate the nervous system and restore balance.
bbsr connects these worlds—modern neuroscience and ancient wisdom—offering simple, grounded ways to calm the body and ease the mind.
heart disease and stroke.
The link between stress and disease is becoming more and more clear. The strongest and most clear-cut case of stress causing disease is with heart disease and strokes.
We often think of stress as work stress and overwhelm from having too much to do. But this is not the deadliest stress: emotional stress has a huge toll on the heart.
High job strain — where demands are high and control is low — increases heart disease risk by about 23% but PTSD raises the risk of heart disease by 50 to 100 % (Taken from meta analyses and large populations).
And acute emotional shocks — grief, rage, sudden fright — can directly trigger heart attacks, arrhythmias, or even sudden cardiac death within hours.
For strokes, the pattern is much the same.
Chronic stress, PTSD, and depression increase long-term stroke risk by 30–45%.
And acute stress events — an outburst of anger, sudden grief — can double the risk of stroke in the next hour.
infections.
There are two key things going on here. First, stress weakens us. But the compounding factor is that bacteria can sense this and actually become more aggressive when we are vulnerable. They have been with us for hundreds of thousands of years shaping our biology as much as we shape theirs. Their survival is intimately tied to ours, and part of this survival depends on their ability to read our internal state.
When we are stressed, we release chemical signals. Bacteria are attuned to these signals — they are cues that we are off balance. In response, they flip on attack mode: multiplying faster, producing toxins, and invading tissues. You can see this with gut and skin infections:
Gut infections: Under stress, gut microbes like E. coli and Salmonella can grow 10–1000 times faster and switch on their “attack genes.” In one study, mice were given a harmless dose of Salmonella — normally too small to cause illness. But when the mice were stressed, half of them died from that same tiny dose.
Traveler’s diarrhea: Among travellers, those under high stress were almost twice as likely to develop diarrhea compared to low-stress travellers.
Hospital infections: In hospitals, stress and critical illness raise the risk of Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) infections — a dangerous gut infection. Stress not only increases the chance of infection, it also makes relapse more likely.
Skin infections: Stress slows wound healing by 20–40%
Colds (rhinovirus): Landmark studies showed that people exposed to cold viruses in a lab were 2–3 times more likely to actually get sick if they reported high life stress.
Stress greatly increases the risk for diabetes.
Large, long-term studies show all kinds of stress are some of the biggest risk factors for diabetes:
Psychosocial stress raises risk by 45%: In a long study of 10,000 UK civil servants, followed for ~20 years, people with chronic psychosocial stress (job strain, work stress, life stress) had a 45% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared with low-stress peers.
Depression increased risk of type 2 diabetes by about 37%.
Veterans with PTSD had about double the risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared with veterans without PTSD.
We see much the same thing with viruses- they lie dormant until we, their host, come under stress. Viruses have been part of life since the beginning, evolving alongside every living thing because they need host cells to survive. In humans, some viruses stay with us for life — like herpes, EBV, and varicella — hiding quietly in our bodies. When stress or immune weakness gives them the opportunity, they can reemerge, causing cold sores, shingles, or fatigue flare-ups.
