How can stress affect people in the modern society?

Loi has gratuated from university five monthes before, he is seeking for a job, but he is not satisfied with any offered jobs. As most of his friends have started their working life, but he still has nothing to do. He started to worry about his furture. He becomed depressed, started smocking, and he loss weight as he lost his appetite. All of these were caused by stress, which is the “emotional and physical way ” in which our bodies respond to pressure.(Guy Slowik MD FRCS, 2011) Modern life is more stressful than the past time as it has more hasses, deadlines, frustrations and demands. Stress will affect people positivly such as providing a motivation of working hard, or it will affect people negatively, such as loss of appetite and unhealthy behavoir and so on. “Unlike a physical complaint such as a broken leg that is easy to spot and identify, stress can have a multitude of symptoms and affects different people in different ways.”(How does stress affect people people at work, by kate pullen)  In general, stress affects people’s physical health most by affecting people’s internal system and causing irregular behavior.

Firstly, stress would affect people’s physical health by damaging people internal system such as Immune system. Immune system is designed to protecct us by agasinsting the viruses or bacteria from outside of the bodies. However, it consumes a lot of engery to fight those “ousiders”. Moreover, “evidence from both human and animal study shows that, when the  body under chronic stress, it will weaken a person’s immune system”(National Cancer Institue). As the Immune system getting weaker and weaker, there does not have extral energy to fight with virus. Thus, the body is unable to protect us from againsting with the virus or other bacteria. Therefor, when the body is under stress such as before or after big events, people is more easily got sick than normal days. On the way, some studies also indicated the stress afftects growth of certain kinds of virus-related tumors indirectly. Such as Kaposi sarcoma. Thus, when people’s immune system is affected, people easy got sick. Therefore, stress influence our physical health a lot. However, the recent research with animal models (animals with a disease that is similar to or the same as a disease in humans) also suggests that “the body’s neuroendocrine response can directly alter important process in cells that help protect against the formation of cancer, such as DNA repair.” (National Cancer Institute) Thus, stress influence people's immune system will affect people's physical health in both good and bad ways.

Secondly, human’s physical health would also be affectted by unhealthy behavior caused by unpropriately deal with stress, such as over drinking alcohol. From past to present, alcohol believed as “stress reliever”. Shakespeare referred to alcohol's stress-reducing properties in his play Julius Caesar (Act IV, Scene III): "Speak no more of her. Give me a bowl of wine. In this I bury all unkindness...." The concept that alcohol can "calm the nerves" is, therefore, more and more people choose to use alcohol to relieve their stress. In fact, it does not help much. Even alcohol make them feel better temporarily, but over a long time, people will choose to believe in alcohol rather than deal with stress when they feel bad or stressful. When people too much depend on alcohol, and drink too much alcohol will experience some extreme negative effects. These include unconsciousness, coma, and even death. As alcohol cause loss of brain cells, heart failure and stomach ulcers. (Gabriel J. Adams the negative of drinking too much alcohol)Research also shows, every year up to 22,000 premature deaths are associated in some way with drinking too much alcohol. (www.nhs.uk) Moreover, too much stress will also lead people to commit suicide. Singapore as one of high stress country average every day has one people commit sucide. Samaritans of Singapore in 2010 released that there are 401 commit suicide during year 2009. Therefor, stress is tighted with people’s behavior and is very much related to our lives.

Lastly, Stress is everywhere, it’s apart of life. No one can completely avoid it. As stress is very much related to human’s health and lives, people need to stand to fight with stress in a right way but not to show white flag to it. Even most of the time stress brings bad and negative impacts, sometimes little stress may helpful on the way of working or studying. Therefore, we need to face stress positively, and relieve stress appropriately such as listening to music, have a nice walk and so on.