Stress is part of our lives. We live with it, deal with it, and worry about it on daily basis. Our way of life, the area in which we live or economy can cause a great deal of stress. But not everyone deals with the same amount of stress and there are several factors that can impact people’s lives and cause us to have lower or higher stress levels. We can become stressed because of catastrophic life events, personal stressors and simple daily hassles. Stressors can have positive effects, arousing and motivating us to solve problems. But usually it doesn’t have positive effect on us, on the opposite, it can shorten our lives, age us too early, make us unhappy yet we cannot seem to get rid of it.
Nowadays we have a branch of psychology - psychophysiology that is concerned with the relationship between mental and physical processes; it is the scientific study of the interaction between mind and body. Everybody should be aware that a disease can occur because of a mental problem, especially because of stress. There is a special term for that -
Living with AIDS can be an endless source of stress that is not easily handled alone. Accumulation of negative life events over several years of follow up predicts worse AIDS related outcomes. “Researchers have found that stress and negative emotions do correlate with a progression from HIV infection to AIDS and with the speed of decline in those infected (Bower & others, 1998; Kiecolt-Glaser & Glaser, 1995; Leserman & others, 1999).”
Stress and negative emotions have also been linked to cancer’s rate of progression. Psychological stress has not been proved to produce cancer, but psychological stress that lasts for a long time may affect a person’s overall health and ability to fight with cancer. And stress might promote cancer indirectly by weakening the immune system's anti-tumor defense or by encouraging new tumor-feeding blood vessels to