The Real Reason You Get Sick After A Stressful Period Has Ended

Have you ever wondered how you manage to get through a particularly stressful period – whether it's an intense deadline at work, final exams in school or a spate of holiday houseguests – only to get sick after the stress has lifted? It's not a fluke. It's a phenomenon that's often referred to as "the let-down effect," a pattern in which people come down with an illness or develop flare-ups of a chronic condition not during a concentrated period of stress but after it dissipates, explains psychologist Marc Schoen, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California–Los Angeles and the author of "When Relaxation Is Hazardous to Your Health." Research has linked the let-down of perceived stress with an increase in flare-ups of pain and other ailments. One study found that people experience more panic attacks on the weekends, and a 2015 study from Taiwan found that holidays and Sundays have more emergency room admissions for peptic ulcers than weekdays do. In a 2014 study, researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York had migraine sufferers track their symptoms and stress patterns in a three-month electronic diary; it turned out that participants' stress levels didn't impact migraine occurrence, but a decline in their perceived stress from one evening entry to the next entry was associated with increased migraine onset over the following six to 18 hours &nd...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news