Cory Said:

What role does stress play in your physical / mental / emotional health?

We Answered:

Stress can disrupt your physical well being, your mental functioning, and your emotional health.

Stress is a natural and even necessary part of our lives. It serves to drive us to better performance. However, too much stress wreaks havoc on the body, mind, and emotions.

Physically, stress has been linked to cardiovascular disease, ulcers, cancer, bowel disease, anxiety, depression, and a host of other maladies. Fatigue and lack of sleep are the most common elements causing these physical symptoms.

Stress can make us mentally sharp, but too much of it causes short-term memory loss, confusion, inability to organize one's thoughts, and anxiety/panic attacks.

Emotionally, stress can trigger many underlying mental illnesses, some quite serious, such as mania or depression, psychosis, and Generalized anxiety Disorder. These conditions require medication and therapy.

I myself get headaches, restlessness, hypomania, depression, more acid reflux, tight muscles, overeating, forgetfulness, irritability, and I don't perform anywhere near my best. My creativity drops, as does my self esteem. Often I become reclusive and stuck in a rut.

Learning to lesson stress is important. Eating right, avoiding alcohol and street drugs, and strenuous exercise help. I try to force myself to be around friends. I look at the stressors that set me off and try to avoid them or change them.

Allof the above pertains to anxiety as well.

Marie Said:

How dose alcohol effect your mental,emotional and social health?

We Answered:

We all know that a dog lapping up spilled antifreeze in a driveway puddle will not stop injesting the poison contained within it as long as it is there to be consumed. The dog doesn't know it is poison that will lead with immutable certainty to its death. It just knows that it tastes good. So the dog does not stop. In the end, it dies unnecessarily and prematurely; a victim of its own excess.

The alcoholic, like the dog, will not stop injesting his particular poison as long as it is there and readily available to be consumed. The alcoholic knows it is poison and, if not stopped, will eventually lead to his unnecessary and premature mental, emotional, social and even physical death.

We can excuse the dog as it knows no better. But the person?

An alcohol saturated prefrontal cortex loses its ability to think clearly or logically and an alcohol overworked liver cannot hope to stave off becoming cirhrotic to the point of death. Emotional regression to a more baser instinct within us cannot help but negativise us beyond our ability to control how we see ourselves in any way other than self destructively proactive and loving it. Socially, all those who might actually want to help the alcoholic back into the society from which alcohol exiled him are turned off in their effort by the subject's opposition and intransigence. For the helper, it is a heart rending sadness to witness. For the alcoholic, it is a matter of no concern.

How ironic of human nature that, in the pouring of a drink, the roles of the helper and the alcoholic can so easily be reversed to the point of lowering oneself to the status of a dying dog.