What Does Stress Do To You? Part 4

So, sadly, as you have seen, stress causes people much harm and misery. This is not surprising, since it is responsible for up to ninety-five percent of the illnesses that afflict human beings, as I have mentioned. And since we humans are made up of trillions of cells, stress inevitably has an effect on us at the level of our cells. Amongst others, these effects include the following:
O stress makes our wounds take much longer to healr
O stress makes us more vulnerable to developing auto-immune diseasesr
O stress weakens our immune system and makes us more prone to cancers and infectionsr
O stress impairs the ability of our cells (both brain and body cells) to communicate effectively.

OK, we have seen that stress makes you sick and unhappy. But not only that, stress also makes you financially poorer! Stress takes money out of your pocket.When you are stressed and become ill because of it, you of course need to pay your doctor or other healthcare provider for his or her services in assisting you to get out of this unhappy state. And you either pay your doctor directly in cash or via your health insurance company or medical aid. However, regardless of how you pay you lose money each time you get sick.This is money which could have been put to better use. And the more often you get ill, the more money it costs you to get well of course until you reach a point where you are unable to pay any more – or your insurance company or medical aid informs you that your funds have dried up. Many chronically-stressed people are, unfortunately, all-too-familiar with this scenario.

And if this scenario was not bad enough, worse still is the fact that the cost of healthcare has been spiraling out of control for many years now, making healthcare unaffordable for more and more people – even those not suffering from chronic stress!

So sickness is not only a miserable and unpleasant experience but it also costs a lot of money to get out of this unnatural state of being. The reality is in fact that billions of rands in South Africa and trillions of dollars in the USA, for example, are spent each year on assisting millions of sick people in these countries to get back into a healthy state of being. The same situation applies to many other countries around the world of course.

Here are some of the shocking amounts of money spent on healthcare:
• R125 billion in South Africa (2005)
• US$ 1, 99 trillion - or an estimated $6,697 for each US citizen (2005)
• US$ 4.1 trillion globally! (2004)

But stress and illness not only makes people poorer, it also robs them of their time. So Stress also takes time out of your day – and makes you less productive. Stressed and ill people often take time off from work to rest and recuperate and therefore often have a worse absenteeism record than healthier people. Because of their frequent bouts of illness they also tend to achieve less or are less productive than healthier people. Time that is spent in a state of stress and illness could, like your money, be put to better use I am sure will agree.