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How Stress Affects Your Heart Essay

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In Spring 2014, 43.7% of college students across the United States reported experiencing “above average” levels of stress and 11.0% reported feeling “tremendous” levels of stress within the last 12 months (“Spring 2014 Reference Group” 16). According to a another study done in 2010 by the Higher Education Research Institute at University of California, Los Angeles, college students’ perception of their mental health has been on a steady decline since 1985 (Pryor 2010). Elevated levels of stress while attending college has shown to have negative effects on both mental and physical health, but the article “How Stress Affects Your Heart” emphasizes the threat of stress to physical well being in the long-term as well. Indirectly, the article cites how chronic stress leads to unhealthy habits such as “smoking, being sedentary, overusing alcohol, and eating poorly or overeating”. Unhealthy habits such as these can result in an increased risk of developing hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol (“How Stress Affects Your Heart”). Stress can also directly affect you by increasing hormones that pose threats to cardiovascular health such as adrenaline and cortisol, and acute stress can cause a spike in blood pressure which increases the chance of a heart attack (“How Stress Affects Your Heart”). Therefore, as stress decreases health, enhanced stress in college students contributes to health disparities between students and non-students in the Unites States. However, varying

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