A healthy mind in a healthy body. This proverb has truth in it, emphasizing the relationship between lifestyle and mental health. Unhealthy habits such as smoking or a sedentary lifestyle can aggravate stress responses, and can increase the risk for stress-related health problems.
What is an unhealthy lifestyle?
An unhealthy lifestyle comprises a number of activities, or bad habits, you do that do not support your health. Some of these bad habits are things that you, such as smoking, whereas others are things that you are not doing although you should, such as exercising). Here is a list of some bad habits that indicate an unhealthy lifestyle.
- Smoking
- Having an unhealthy diet (eating too much or too little, too much fat, sugar or fat)
- Drinking too much and too often alcohol
- Substance abuse (drugs, overuse of medication)
- Taking unnecessary harmful risks (having unprotected sex, driving over the speed limit, etc.)
- Self-harming
- Not getting enough sleep
- Not doing enough physical activity
- Being too sedentary
- Ignoring signs and symptoms of illness or emotional distress
Of course, not all of these bad habits need to apply in order to qualify for an unhealthy lifestyle. We all know that smoking or a lack of sleep can have consequences for your health by themselves, for example. This is to say that one of these bad habits can weaken your health and increase your susceptibility to stress.
Equilibrium (homeostasis) and maintaining equilibrium (allostasis)
To understand why an unhealthy lifestyle increases stress, it is necessary to go back to some of the scientific core principles of stress. We have written an article about this that you can read here.
These core principles concern equilibrium, known as homeostasis, and the physiological process in your body and brain to maintain equilibrium or to set a new equilibrium to adapt to a stressful situation (allostasis).
Equilibrium in the body is reached when all physiological systems such as hormones, nutrient supply, oxygen, defense against invading bacteria and viruses, and brain activity are all balanced. In this way, the body is calibrated to function optimally. However, when a stressful event presents itself, equilibrium is disturbed and the body enters a condition of stress. The stress reactions in the body try to restore equilibrium, and once equilibrium is reached, the stress is over.
Allostasis refers to the efforts the body has to make to reach equilibrium. This includes the activity of stress reactions and the activity of other physiological systems that are necessary to deal with the stress (the problem that causes stress). For example, if the stressor is a viral infection, then the immune system will be put to work to eliminate the viruses from the body. This changed activity of the immune system is thus part of allostasis. In general terms, homeostasis (equilibrium) is maintained through allostasis (altered physiological activity to deal with stressors).
The amount of effort to restore homeostasis is referred to as allostatic load. To get back to our example of the viral infection, the allostatic load will be low when only a few and relatively harmless viruses have entered the body. On the other hand, when the viruses are numerous and dangerous to health, the allostatic load will be high.
Scheme indicating the concept of equilibrium, allostatic load lifestyle and stress. For a person with a healthy lifestyle, physiological and mental equilibrium will be optimal. To cope with stress, the allostatic load will not be too big to exceed physiological limits. For a person with an unhealthy lifestyle, the same allostatic load, caused by the same stressor, can lead to strong stress responses, because equilibrium is already close to acceptable physiological and mental limits, and the allostatic load will bring the body beyond acceptable limits. The stress responses will thus have to be strong to get out of the danger zone outside these limits to restore an acceptable equilibrium.
Equilibrium, allostatic load and unhealthy lifestyle
What do homeostasis and allostasis have to do with increased stress susceptibility, you might wonder. To address this, you would have to realize that homeostasis depends on the circumstances in which you live. If you are leading a healthy lifestyle, your equilibrium will be optimal, far away from a state where you might fall ill easily. On the other hand, if you are living an unhealthy lifestyle, your equilibrium will not be optimal because your body has to try to offset the negative effects of any of the bad habits you may have. This means that your equilibrium will be at a different level than that for people living a healthy lifestyle, and be closer to a state where the risk of disease can occur.
The next step: imagine that person A with a healthy lifestyle and person B with a very unhealthy lifestyle encounter the same stressor. For person A, the allostatic load will not surpass the limits of the physiological range in which the body remains healthy and can form a new equilibrium. The same allostatic load, however, for person B may bring the physiological systems over the edge of what the body can cope with. The result is that person B will have to work harder to get back to physiological acceptable limits, meaning more stress and higher stress hormone levels. If person B does not succeed to get back to an acceptable equilibrium, person B will get sick.
Smoking as an example
When you are stressed, you may think that picking up a cigarette is a good idea. But in reality, smoking makes stress worse.
This is because the nicotine increases your heart rate and causes blood pressure to spike. To compensate for this, your heart has to work harder. Also, smoking makes breathing harder, so that also your lungs have to put more effort into establishing an equilibrium. Thus, a smoking person will not become sick immediately, but his or her equilibrium with increased heart rate and supplementary activity from the lungs to compensate for the reduced availability of oxygen, is closer to physiological healthy limits than the equilibrium in a non-smoker would be.
If a smoker encounters a stressor, the allostatic load imposed by the stressor will make the stress systems in the body harder to stay within acceptable physiological limits. Indeed, scientists have found that the level of the stress hormone cortisol in smokers is higher during stress than in non-smokers.
This is in a nutshell why smokers are at higher risk of illness, and not only of the increased risk of developing lung cancer.
Working conditions as a cause of an unhealthy lifestyle
Recent studies by the Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace have shown that unhealthy lifestyle habits such as smoking, consuming poor diets and lack of exercise can be triggered by stressful working conditions.
The first study, published in the The Scientific World Journal in 2015 was conducted at 18 nursing homes with 1506 healthcare workers. The results show a correlation between a wide range of stressful working conditions and workers who were smokers, overweight and physically inactive. These correlations were not related to low socio-economic status, another factor known to cause stress.
The study further showed that nearly 90 percent of the study participants experienced work stress, for various reasons. Smoking appeared to be twice as high among nursing aides exposed to at least three of five job stressors: low decision control, low supervisor support, having another paid job, physically demanding work and recent physical assault.
According to the researchers, physical and mental stress at work can make it difficult for people to retain good living habits.
Interestingly, the study showed that young workers are at greater risk of developing bad lifestyle habits. The researchers proposed that this is because young workers try to feel better by smoking and adopting high-calorie diets (pleasure foods), whereas older workers may have adapted to their poor working conditions over time.
The second study from the same research center and in collaboration with the Massachusetts Coalition of Occupational Safety and Health, published in the journal Health Promotion Practice in 2016, focused on eating habits by people engaged in low-wage jobs. It turned out that high job demands and low job control left little time for adequate lunch breaks, which resulted in eating quickly, overeating, or skipping meals.
Both studies show a clear correlation between stressful jobs and unhealthy habits, resulting in an unhealthy lifestyle. Thus, stress at work can lead to an unhealthy lifestyle, which in turn leads to increased susceptibility to stress. It is thus important to reduce stress at work, which is one of the key topics on the Stressinsight website and in the membership area.
