Stress and Psychosomatic Disorders

Stress is defined as : the physical response to events that threaten or challenge us
Psychosomatic Disorders is defined as: Medical problems caused by the interaction of psychological, emotional, and physical difficulties.


**During the teenage years, stress can become even more of an issue because so much tends to be going on inside a teenagers life. Stress over social issues, educational issues, and home life can cause anyone to be bogged down and finding themselves wondering why this or that has caused them problems. Sometimes, these problems are hard to identify, and even that causes a sense of stress because the child can be struggling to understand the entire problem, not realizing they are allowing it to take over their thinking completely. Our textbook refers to problems that come from our body fighting off the bad effects stress can cause us. It mentions that headaches, backaches, skin rashes, sleep disturbances, indigestion and even the common cold can be all related and linked to the level of stress a person has.
Psychosomatic disorders can happen, when medical issues occur, like ulcers, asthma, high blood pressure, etc. Sometimes these occurrences were going to happen, but due to stress they are worsen or brought on earlier in life due to stress.

**I can recall, in high school, having a number of days at school, where I made myself sick worrying about school work or what a friend said. The worse I remember, I had to act out a short monologue play and I got so nervous that I came down with blotchy red skin, and felt like it was hard to breath, ended up walking out on the class, chickened out and didn't perform. I ended up having to do the performance by myself with the teacher there. I had the worse case of stage fright ever! It was so embarrassing to have this happen, my junior year in high school! I even think I made my mom let me stay home the next day so I didn't have to face anyone. Secretly hoping no one would recall what happened.

I can also remember how nervous I would get when I had to tell my parents something bad or if I had not so good grades... the nervousness about talking to my parents would keep me from eating and make me have a bad attitude about everything. It was miserable sometimes to have to know I was going to have to explain myself or talk to my parents about my grades. I would have rather cleaned the house 10 times before dealing with my issues with them. Not to say I was a bad kid, no matter what the problem was, I would stress out a great deal, sometimes unnecessarily, just because I thought I knew I was burnt toast!