Chronic Worry: 3 Health Effects And How To Deal With Them

Chronic worry is a very common psychological dynamic today, almost always marked by stress and pressure.

We are facing yet another component of anxiety, a symptom that, without being pathological in most cases, causes great physical and emotional exhaustion for the person who suffers it daily.

They are like mental storms, like bottomless pits that we fall into daily and keep thinking about certain things that didn’t happen or that are simply part of our past.

This situation, when the mind is dedicated to suffering or obsessively thinking about certain things, weakens our productivity and, in essence, our quality of life.

Furthermore, it is important to consider that worrying as a means of dealing with problems is not always useful.

The reason? When we worry excessively, negativity and impotence appear, therefore, we are no longer useful to ourselves by not focusing on more practical strategies.

In addition, we must not forget an essential detail: chronic worry has a high cost to our health.

Here are some of its effects and how to address them with more effective strategies.

1. Muscle tension because of excessive worry

We’ve all been through this at some point. Arriving at the end of the day and noticing the muscles in the neck and jaw much more rigid and painfully tense.

• Most of the time we are not aware of the multitude of biological reactions that cause the excessive worry which, as we have already pointed out, is an additional component of the anxiety demon.

• When we worry too much throughout the day, our brain starts releasing cortisol, the stress hormone, into the blood. What cortisol does is prepare us for flight or fight.
• In turn, the brain sends a great deal of our energy and blood flow to our muscles to help us respond.

These processes generate muscle and joint tension, in addition to headaches, stomachaches, nausea…

What can we do to reduce muscle tension?

We know that the source of this muscle tension and overload is excessive worry. The strategy would therefore start by working on these obsessive and intrusive thoughts.

However, to reduce the impact of the secondary effects of anxiety, worry and daily stress load, we can undoubtedly put these dimensions into practice:

• Short duration but high intensity exercises. We need to release energy, channel it, tire the body to calm the mind.
• Choose the exercises that best fit your personal characteristics, taking into account, for example, that if you have a contracture, the ideal is to go with more care.
• Sets of sit-ups, walking or even dancing zumba can be very cathartic.

2. Tiredness and chronic worry

It happens in most cases: the mental agony, the tangle of our worries and the anxiety that we don’t know how to manage, end up impacting our body.

The mind is the one that consumes all our energy, it saps our spirits and even the will to carry out a large part of our daily tasks and responsibilities.

Little by little, we get stuck in this vicious and exhausting cycle that worry causes, and we also get stuck with physical fatigue.

What can we do to lessen the impact of tiredness?

A positive way of looking at chronic worrying is to apply what is known as “programmed worrying”. It is as follows:

• Set a time throughout the day to work on finding a solution to these concerns.
• When a thought comes up, say to yourself: “this is not the time to empower you, I will think about it when finishing the work and in front of a paper” .
• Every concern must serve something, to find a solution. If the worry is unresolved, then it doesn’t make sense to invest time in it.
• Also, it’s important that we never take this “programmed worry” to bed, meaning that we never go to bed with a worry in mind.

3. Chronic worry weakens our immune system

Worrying about a project, about an interview, about a surgery that we will go through soon, is something natural and understandable.

The problem arises when worry settles in our daily lives to occupy each of our thoughts.

• If, in addition, said concerns and internal reflections are always negative, all of this has a direct impact on our health.
• Not only does the level of cortisol in the blood rise, but adrenaline soars…
• Our entire organism is in an “alert state”, because the brain interprets that there is a risk to which it is necessary to react.

• All biological resources and energy go to the muscles and brain. Thus, other systems are completely lacking, such as the immune system.
• Thus, we are no longer able to react effectively to a virus or bacteria. Thus, we are more sensitive to infections, colds, allergies…

What can we do to take care of our immune system?

Don’t put off for tomorrow the worry you feel today. Don’t let the problem get bigger, don’t procrastinate what today could have a solution.

• When you go through periods of stress and anxiety, try to take care of your diet, consuming fresh and natural foods. Above all, avoid ready-to-eat foods rich in saturated fats.
• Invest in your socialization, share your concerns with others, spend time with your friends, as this will weaken the focus on our anxieties, stop giving importance to what obsesses us or what we only see in a negative way.

• Exercise in a natural environment for at least half an hour a day, try to oxygenate yourself, activate your circulation, remove tension from your muscles, free your mind…

In conclusion, as we have seen, chronic worry can be tackled in a number of ways.

Find those strategies that best suit your personality and start channeling your anxiety to enjoy a better quality of life, with the well-being you deserve.