Does the perception that stress affects your health matter more than the stress itself when it comes to your health and mortality risk?

Does the perception that stress affects your health matter more than the stress itself when it comes to your health and mortality risk?

Stress can be broadly defined as any situation in which either environmental and/or personal demands, exceed an individual's resources and ability to adapt. At StriveStronger we regularly get asked by clients, "is stress doing me harm?". While it's easy to point to studies about specific life stressors and disease risk, one often overlooked study from 2012 highlights that our perceptions of what harm the stress may be doing to us is perhaps as important, and maybe even more important than the stress itself. 

The study conducted by researchers from the University of Wisconsin – Madison examined the relationship among the amount of stress, the perception that stress affects health, and health and mortality outcomes in a nationally representative sample of 28,753 U.S. adults. In this study, data from the 1998 National Health Interview Survey were linked to prospective National Death Index mortality data over 8 years. Statistical models specifically examined the interaction between the amount of stress and the perception that stress affects health, controlling for sociodemographic, health behaviour, and access to healthcare factors.

The researchers reported that 33.7% of the sample perceived that stress affected their health a lot or to some extent. Adults who reported a little or a moderate amount of stress were 16% and 36% more likely to report being in poor health respectively compared to those who reported experiencing almost no stress in the prior 12 months. However, compared to those who reported hardly any or no perceptions of stress affecting health, those who reported perceiving that stress affected health "some" or "a lot" were about two times (and four times more likely to report being in poor health, respectively.  Additionally, in this study, those who reported a lot of stress and perceiving that stress affected one's health a lot increased the risk of premature death by 43%. Importantly, those who reported taking attempts to reduce their stress in the prior 12 months were 8% less likely to report being in poor health compared to those who made no effort to reduce stress.

The researchers conclude that high amounts of stress and the perception that stress impacts your health are each associated with poor health and mental health, with perceiving that the stress is doing your health harm associated with highest health risk. Individuals who perceived that stress affects their health and reported a large amount of stress had an increased risk of premature death but those who actively worked to reduce stress in the preceding year were significantly less likely to report poor health.

Our take at StriveStronger is that stress is one of the most talked-about challenges people present in today's modern society. This study highlights the detrimental effect of stress on health risk and future premature mortality, while importantly demonstrating the additional risk associated with believing that the stress is doing you harm. While stress is not new to humans, the challenges of balancing stress with recovery is not always an easy one and what can be positive challenging stress can easily turn to distress as you exceed your stress coping mechanism/ capacity. Our advice is that if you feel like you have too much stress in your life, and that this stress is affecting your wellbeing, seek professional help and act to reduce stress and increase your stress coping, which in turn has been shown to reduce the long term detrimental effects. 

Read the full article here:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3374921/pdf/nihms357494.pdf

Reference: Keller, A., Litzelman, K., Wisk, L. E., Maddox, T., Cheng, E. R., Creswell, P. D., & Witt, W. P. (2012). Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality. Health psychology: official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, 31(5), 677–684. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026743