Our basic understanding of stress is that of a situation that goes far beyond a person’s realm of control. In the case of a woman, her inability to control certain marital situations causes her undue stress which manifests in various ways. It is these very manifestations and their effects on the health of a woman, in terms of heart risks and breast cancer survival, that shall be discussed in as great detail as possible within this paper. The term stress, is defined by Dr. Larry Alan Nadig in his online article “Stress: A Health And Relationship Killer” as the failure of a person to balance the demands of his life with his capabilities. In other words:
Stress is an internal process that occurs when a person is faced with a demand that is perceived to exceed the resources available to effectively respond to it, and where failure to effectively deal with the demand has important undesirable consequences. (Nadig, “Stress: A Health And Relationship Killer, par. 2)
Stress is already a common part of our daily lives. We live each day faced with the pressure of having to make various decisions that affect the way we conduct our lives and daily business. This is an illness that is highly complicated and just barely understood by medical science. It is a symptom of the way our lives have become so very hectic and choice-driven in the 21st century. Men, women, and children are constantly subjected to either mental, emotional, or physical stress because, as human beings, we are blessed with the ability to adjust and change our personalities and actions depending upon the needs and situations that we constantly find ourselves in. Since these changes are constant, we find that we are under constant stress to adapt our way of life and thinking to better suit the various situations that we constantly find ourselves existing in.
These factors are known as stressors. Ordinary folk know it as Strain and can be considered a negative effect of stress. Usually, these strains are found within the circle of activity that we conduct our lives in. To begin with, as a child, we were constantly faced with the stress of needing to make friends and be accepted by our peers. While in school, we drove ourselves to the limits of our stress capability by finding a way to balance school with our other social activities. As adults, the strain then came from having to perform well at the job where we earn our income in exchange for a little recognition, or perhaps, even a promotion, from the company. Once we find ourselves married, marital stress is added to the mix as both the husband and the wife find themselves embroiled in an almost daily battle to discover that middle ground wherein both parties can agree on something without having to duke it out with either arguments or physical action. Parents face the stress of needing to prove to the world that they can raise a child properly while continuing to have a career for themselves. All of these stress-related scenarios lead to various health problems for the person. These health problems, although medically diagnosed with a root cause, usually have an underlying psychological reason for existing. It is that psychological reason that is caused by the stress factor.
These negative effects manifest in various physical and mental activities of the person. In fact, there is even a term for this health risk. Steve Connor wrote in his article titled “ Marital Stress Can Cause Heart Disease” that the illness is known as Metabolic Syndrome and is defined by experts as:
… a range of risk factors that can lead to heart disease, stroke and diabetes. (Connor, Marital Stress Can Cause Heart Disease, par. 1)
Recent studies have shown that heart disease runs rampant among women who exist in a stress-filled relationship. This is because a woman has the tendency to overanalyze the various situations she finds herself mired in.There are actually a number of factors that contribute to the occurrence of heart disease amongst women in a stressful married relationship. Some of those factors include arguments, hostility, and conflict, and result in the female becoming depressed while she is in the relationship.
Stress has also been known to cause cancer in some female patients. The most common kind of stress-related cancer is Breast Cancer. I can vouch for this personally because I had an aunt whose problematic marriage caused her undue stress and led to her constant battle to survive breast cancer in the process. She had married a man 24 years her junior after spent most of her life raising her 3 daughters alone as a widow. After her children had settled into their own lives, she decided it was time to give herself a chance. Remarrying was the way she thought she could start over with her life.
Unfortunately, the man she married was selfish and did not understand the meaning of compromise. So he bossed her around at every chance he got and my aunt, owing to the age gap, clearly always let him have his way in order to make him happy. What we did not realize at the time however was that she was suffering from tremendous stress in the relationship. Stress manifested itself one day when she was diagnosed with Stage 3 Breast Cancer. She managed to beat the cancer over time. Her husband also changed his ways a little and lessened the stress that she was often subjected to. But over the time covering her recovery process, he found himself reverting to his old ways. Thus returning the stress that caused the cancer in the first place.
Marital Stress has negative effects upon women who are recovering from serious illnesses such as breast cancer. These stressful marriages take their toll on the cancer patient and cause her to be less physically active and show more signs of complications when compared to those breast cancer patients in healthier marriages. Dr. Rick Nauert explained in his article “ Marital Discord Impacts Breast Cancer Survival” that married women, or women in general who have been diagnosed with breast cancer and/or have undergone treatment but exist in stressful relationships show slower signs of recovery than their counterparts involved in healthy relationships. He goes on to further illustrate his point by saying that:
Researchers found that, over five years, patients in distressed marriages had higher levels of stress, less physical activity, slower recovery and more symptoms and signs of illness than did similar patients who reported good marriages.
Everyday stress takes its toll on a woman’s body physically by activating the sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis which, in the long run, causes the activation and existence of the various health problems due to stress-related illnesses found in the women of today. The information as indicated in the preceding pages merely scrapes the tip of the iceberg in terms of presenting the causes and effects of a stressful relationship on the health of the modern woman. These studies have made it highly obvious that stressful relationships are hazardous to any woman’s health and should therefore be avoided or minimized at all costs.
References
Connor, Steve. “Marital Stress Can Cause Heart Disease”. The Independent. 2009. Web.
Nadig, Larry Alan, Phd. “Stress: A Health And Relationship Killer”. Larry Alan Nadig, PhD. : Clinical Psychologist, Marriage and Family Therapist. 2008. Web.
Nauert, Ric. “Marital Discord Impacts Breast Cancer Survival”. Psychcentral. 2008. Web.