Inquiry

Overarching question:

• How do stress levels impact mental health

Focus questions:

• What does the term mental health mean, and what does it include?
  • The term mental health refers to a state of well-being in which each individual is cognitively, emotionally and socially healthy. Mental health does not only include the conditions and diseases often associated with it, but also includes mental wellness as well as the study of biology, history and trauma which cause an individuals mental wellness or lack thereof.

• How do high levels of stress affect everyday life
  • high levels of stress have different impacts, depending how extreme and how long the stress has lasted. These impacts are both behavioral, physical and are caused by the constant activation of the fight or flight response. Some of the more serious physical impacts are high blood pressure, heart disease and heart attacks. Some of the behavioral impacts include, angry outbursts, social withdrawal, substance abuse and decrease in physical activity. This shows that stress can cause a serious decline in your overall lifestyle, and can cause the deterioration of your social, mental and physical health.

• What impact does stress have on sleep
  • High stress levels can cause insomnia, by making it more difficult to fall asleep. The adrenaline released by the constantly activated fight or flight response, cause hyper arousal. Hyper arousal shifts the balance between sleep and wakefulness, which makes it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep, it also affects the quality of sleep.
• Does physical health affect mental health, how?
  • Physical and mental health are interconnected in what can be seen as a cycle. When suffering from bad physical health, aspects of mental health can also deteriorate. And vice versa, bad mental health can cause your physical health to deteriorate. For example, people with the highest levels of self – related distress (compared to those with low levels) were 32% more likely to have died from cancer. In comparison, being diagnosed with cancer can cause distress, which further impacts the death rate.
• How can stress be relieved
  • There are many ways in which stress can be relieved. some of these include deep breathing, yoga, tai chi, getting a massage and eating certain foods. However the effects of these can differ in effectiveness. Results from the intervention have shown that yoga is the most effective (out of the methods trialed), but other methods such as deep breathing and eating certain foods can also reduce stress. Another thing to consider is the source of the stress, for example, if someone has high stress levels from a lack of sleep, the obvious relief method would be to get more sleep. However, in extreme cases, medication may be necessary to help decrease the stress. In saying this there are many ways in which a person can reduce stress, with varying levels of success.

Additional information to be found in the Research page