Relationships can cause chronic stress
The English poet, John Donne, once famously said "No man is an island entire unto itself." Social relationships are as important to human survival and wellbeing as food and shelter. If you take normally functioning adults and expose them to long periods of
social isolation, they will eventually break down physically and mentally, and may even die. Married people live longer than unmarried people, on average. Yet certain aspects of relationships can also have damaging effects. It is possible that living with your
parents, hanging out with your friends, or staying married may actually be wearing down your body's resistance to disease. The four scenarios below illustrate some relationship patterns that research has shown can be harmful to your mental and physical health.
Scenario I: Stressed by Toxic Families
Do you find yourself having anxiety attacks and high blood pressure every time you make your annual trek back east to visit your in-laws? Do telephone conversations with your critical and demanding sister make you so frustrated that you eat everything in sight? Do you feel drained and exhausted for days after your dad and high-maintenance stepmother come to visit? Are you so frustrated with your spouse's sitting on the couch and not helping with the housework that you turn to alcohol to cope? Does arguing with your disrespectful teen over household rules and responsibilities give you a migraine?
Scenario 2: Social Pressure to be Unhealthy
As an adolescent did you experiment with alcohol and drugs because you wanted to be part of the "in" crowd? Or did you and your girlfriends obsess together about being thin and having perfect bodies? Did you bond by doing extreme diets together, making yourselves throw up after eating, or taking diet pills and laxatives to speed up the weight loss process? Do you down 6 or 7 drinks every Friday night when you and your friends go out and party, black out, then have a hangover for the rest of the weekend? When you visit your family for the holidays, do you end up gaining 5 or 10 pounds from eating all the cakes and goodies that your family cooked especially for you?
The "sandwich generation" mom has too much on her plate
Do you find yourself so tired from taking care of a house full of kids and your elderly parent or disabled spouse that you collapse into bed exhausted at the end of the day? Have you given up exercising and eating healthy, and the last time you saw a doctor was several years ago? Do you spend all day fantasizing about curling up on the couch at midnight with a bag of potato chips and a tub of ice cream after doing the last round of laundry? Do you forget to eat or eat only at the computer because you are struggling to balance your more than full-time job with all of your family responsibilities?
Scenario 4: Social Withdrawal and Isolation
Are you a single parent who is so busy working and taking care of the kids that you don't have a life of your own? Did you recently relocate away from friends and family because of your own or a spouse's job change and now feel socially isolated? Is your spouse so jealous of or threatened by your friends and family that you hardly ever see them anymore? Do you spend most of your time on your own since your spouse died? Are you so depressed and lonely that you feel like nobody would want to hang out with you, so you stop making the effort?
Discussion
The four scenarios above illustrate four different ways in which social relationships can be harmful to your health. Well-designed research studies have shown that both the amount and the quality of your social relationships can affect many aspects of your health over years or lifetimes. People who are socially connected in large, close and supportive networks of spouses, family, friends, and community groups may experience strong health benefits, including resistance to disease, improved immune and hormonal functioning, less inflammation, better mental health, and longer lives.
Emotional eating caused by relationship stress
There can also be a health downside to relationships, however, Toxic relationships (scenario 1), stressful care-taking responsibilities (scenario 3), or social isolation and absence of supportive familial,
friendship or community networks (scenario 4) can produce chronic
stress that wears you down physically and mentally. Your immune system may become suppressed and not able to fight off disease and tumors as well; you may experience inflammatory responses in vital organs, such as your heart and lungs, and your body's hormonal balance may get out of sync.You may experience chronic anxiety,
depression, fatigue, or muscle pain. In addition to these direct effects, chronic stress may produce negative emotions that lead to unhealthy behaviors in order to avoid or escape these states. Depending on cultural influences,
genes, and your age, you may starve yourself, make yourself throw up after eating, cut yourself, overeat, drink too much alcohol, or develop drug, shopping, work and other types of addictions as ways of dealing with stress. Stressful or demanding relationships may preoccupy your mind and consume your time so that you neglect your own health. These direct and behavioral effects may, over months and years make you more vulnerable to disease and death.
While the behavioral and physiological effects of negative relationships have been known for years, Scenario 2 describes a more recently-discovered process of relationship toxicity. A study published in the July 26, 2011 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, coauthored by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of UC San Diego suggests that obesity is "socially contagious." Using data from thousands of participants in the Framington heart study, these researchers found distinct clusters of obese and non-obese individuals. People whose close friends were obese were more likely to be obese, even if those friends lived thousands of miles away. It wasn't just that people ate similar foods together. in fact, the weight of friends and even friends of friends had as strong relationships to an individual's weight as weight of spouses.
People may develop social norms or beliefs about what are acceptable weight and eating patterns. These standards spread through social networks, potentially influencing the behavior of many closely or distally connected people. Other research has shown that young women who develop eating disorders are also highly affected by their friends' norms and standards about weight control and by exposure to underweight media role models. Similarly, the success of groups like Alcoholics Anonymous may be that they provide access to a new social network to replace the one lost by becoming sober. Many people who meet diagnostic criteria for substance abuse or binge drinking do not realize they have a problem because their friends all have similar drinking patterns. They may not even realize that there are other social groups who drink considerably less. Another example is the extent to which membership in a college fraternity promotes drinking, both as a rite of passage and a bonding mechanism.
What can you do if you recognize yourself in one of these scenarios? Below are some steps you can take to protect your health.
Become Aware of Your Stress Patterns - When you notice yourself feeling stressed or behaving in unhealthy ways, make a record of what was happening just before, who was there, what did they say or do, and what you were thinking and feeling. In this way, you can begin to identify which people and interactions make you feel stressed or likely to overeat, drink too much, or neglect your health.
