Chest Pains And Stress
You’ve been under a lot of stress lately. Fuel prices are skyrocketing that causes the food prices to rise and the cost of living yet your paycheck isn’t rising with the cost of living. You begin to wonder how you will manage to get back and forth from work while still trying pay your bills and feed your family. Then you realize your daycare costs just rose to care for your children. Perhaps you may have family members now looking to you for some help in some way all while your boss expects that project done in the next few days. You’re getting anxious and are beginning to lose sleep over it. You feel the muscles in your body tense and headaches are more frequent when suddenly you have a sharp pain in your chest. It is so severe that you nearly topple over that you find yourself in the hospital wondering if you were having a heart attack. In the following days and weeks, all the tests come back normal with no indication of heart trouble. Now you fret and worry over your health.
If the above picture sounds at all familiar and there is nothing in your history that would indicate any sort of heart ailments or your doctor after doing a battery of tests where everything comes back normal could indicate stress as a factor for chest pains. Although this article is not meant to replace any doctor diagnosis, it is to make aware that stress in high amounts can contribute to unexplained chest pains. To understand how this works one has to understand how the body responds to stress.
When stress becomes overwhelming such as the example given above, the body tends to jump in emergency mode where the body produces a ‘fight or flight’ type response. Although in our early evolutionary path the ‘fight or flight’ response was what could save a life. However too much of this can cause damaging results to the body. When this response is activated by stress, the brain releases a flood of chemicals into the body such as adrenaline causing physical changes to the body. The eyes dilate which improves vision; the blood is redirected into the muscles to increase response time where the body breathes faster and the heart pumps more to circulate and bring oxygen to the muscles. All of these physical changes include the tightening of muscles which can lead to feeling pains in the chest.
So not only are these physical changes occurring due to stress but the worry that a heart condition exists can further tighten the muscles emphasizing the pains in the chest. One way to combat stress chest pains is to learn to relax with breathing exercises to slow down the heart rate and ease tension in the chest. Meditation to help calm and remove tension can also help reduce chest pains. With these simple techniques in mind it can help ease or eliminate pains in the chest related to stress. However any symptom of chest pain should be consulted with your doctor as soon as possible.
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