\n<\/p>\n
\u2018S<\/span>tress has a well-established effect on your immune health,\u201d says Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London. \u201cBut stress is a very broad phenomenon. You can feel stressed watching a horror movie, or you can experience long-term stress, like going through a divorce.\u201d<\/p>\n Short-term stress can temporarily affect your immune system. \u201cThe number of immune cells in the blood changes,\u201d says Davis. \u201cBut it returns to normal within about an hour, so it\u2019s unlikely to have any major impact.\u201d<\/p>\n Long-term stress is a different story. When your body perceives a threat, the adrenal glands release hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. They prepare the body for a \u201cfight or flight\u201d response \u2013 increasing your blood pressure and heart rate, but also suppressing the immune system.<\/p>\n Adding cortisol to immune cells makes them much less effective at destroying diseased cells<\/p>\n \u201cWe can see this even at the molecular level,\u201d says Davis, the author of Self Defence: A Myth-Busting Guide to Immune Health. \u201cIf\u00a0we take immune cells and expose them to diseased cells, like cancer, the\u00a0immune cells will usually destroy them. But if we add cortisol, they become much less effective.\u201d If this exposure to stress hormones lasts for weeks or months, our immune system will be diminished.<\/p>\n Practices such as mindfulness, tai chi and other stress-reduction strategies have been shown to lower cortisol levels, which should benefit immunity. However, proving this is difficult, says Davis. You can\u2019t ethically expose large numbers of people to an illness to test their immune response, and measuring \u201cimmune health\u201d in a\u00a0real-world setting is complicated. \u201cIt\u2019s also hard because you can\u2019t avoid stress,\u201d he adds. \u201cEvery change in our life will have some stress associated with it, and a lot of changes are positive.\u201d<\/p>\n That said, if you\u2019re worried about long-term stress, Davis recommends reaching out to your GP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018Stress has a well-established effect on your immune health,\u201d says Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London. \u201cBut stress is a very broad phenomenon. You can feel stressed watching a horror movie, or you can experience long-term stress, like going through a divorce.\u201d Short-term stress can temporarily affect your immune system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39438,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[37,2292,16111,1933,13006],"class_list":{"0":"post-39437","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-sick","10":"tag-stressed","11":"tag-true","12":"tag-youre"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}