Physically, stress causes blood pressure to rise, as does exercise. When you exercise, all that pressure has somewhere to go – your muscles that are craving sustenance. When you’re just stressed that pressure has nowhere to go and just pushes outward on your blood vessels, which weakens them over time. There are places in your body, mostly your brain, where you don’t want weak blood vessels.
Mentally (via physical responses), stress causes a nearly constant low-level fight-or-flight response via adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline’s job is basically to make you on alert and hyper awake. This makes it very hard to focus, sleep, and make good decisions since you’re basically viewing every single little thing as a potential threat and you have a hormone pumping through your body which only exists to help you make snap reflexive decisions.
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