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WORLD> Health
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Poll: Debt hurts your body, too
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-06-10 10:24 People who reported high stress also were much more likely to have trouble concentrating and sleeping and were more prone to getting upset for no good reason. When their construction business went under four years ago, Pamela Crouch, 61, and her husband, who had retired from General Motors, found themselves struggling under IOUs totaling $30,000. "We just kind of felt desperate. We just really didn't have enough to live on to pay what we had to pay," recalls Crouch of Eaton, Ind. She remembers having trouble sleeping and concentrating. "We ended up paying a lot of our bills just on the credit card," says Crouch, a medical assistant in a nursing home. "We were stressed and depressed. ... It was really rough." Their son, a manager of a construction supply company, recently helped them out with their debt problems. "Things are doing much better," she says. "It made a world of difference in how we feel." It isn't known for certain whether such stress is causing health problems, says Lavrakas, who while at Ohio State University in the late 1990s helped to develop an index to measure the extent to which people are stressed from financial debts. But medical research suggests that most of the symptoms reported in this poll are indeed typical of chronic stress. The body reacts with a "fight-or-flight" response, releasing adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol. That helps you react fast in an emergency, but if the body stays in this high gear too long, those chemicals can wreak physical havoc in numerous systems — everything from a rise in blood pressure and heart rate to problems with memory, mood, digestion, even the immune system. And no, stress doesn't cause stomach ulcers, most are caused by bacteria, but stress can worsen the pain. Regardless of the health implications, Americans are taking on more debt as tough economic times, slowing economic activity, job losses, soaring energy and food prices, slumping home values and record home foreclosures, strain many people's budgets. |
