Obesity and stress - how do they affect each other?

Psychological stress, especially long-term stress, may be one of the factors contributing to the development of overweight and obesity. But excessive body weight often becomes a source of many anxiety for the patient. What is stress and how does it affect weight gain? What emotional problems does obesity cause?

Obesity is a complex disease caused by nutritional errors, environmental abnormalities, metabolic and hormonal disorders, genetic and psychological factors. Among the latter, the use of food as a stress suppressor, reducing emotional tension, may be a stimulant to weight gain .

On the other hand, overweight and obese people experience many psychologically burdensome and stressful situations due to their disease, e.g. those related to dietary restrictions during dietary treatment. Therefore, specialists point out how important it is to personalize the treatment of overweight and obesity for each patient individually and to provide psychological support for this process.

Psychological stress - what is it?

Stress is a well-known concept that we experience at many important life events. It is usually associated with unpleasant experiences. We understand it subconsciously as a negative stimulus that affects our lives.

But positive, even joyful and pleasant situations, such as wedding preparations, meeting with a person important to us, can also be a source of stress for us. However, regardless of the character, people perceive the same stress stimuli in different, very individual ways.

What may be a source of great tension for some people may turn out to be a trivial, meaningless event for others. The way we perceive a stress stimulus depends on our mental endurance, resilience and experienced experiences.

According to Jan Strelau, an excellent Polish psychologist, a person feels strong emotions, negative feelings such as anxiety, fear, helplessness, anger, aggression, and when he is unable to control them, stress arises in his body.

Modern medicine defines psychological stress as the complexity of stimuli and responses that lead to the psychological and physiological arousal of the body. Thus, the phenomenon of stress is treated in three ways:

• as a stimulus that can cause tension and strong emotions,
• as a reaction that is the psychological or physiological response of the body,
• as a process, the relationship of an organism with its environment.

Stressor - what is it?

Stressors are stimuli that contribute to stress. They can be broadly divided into:

• minor everyday troubles,
• serious challenges and threats,
• dramatic events.

This division depends on the strength of the stimulus and the human tolerance to threats. Stressors come from different places. The source of stress may be our closest environments, such as: family home, place of work or study. Then we are often exposed to the stimuli derived from them and they can be a source of harmful, long-term stress.

Stress - how to fight it?

Stress significantly affects the quality of our life, our emotional and social development, functioning in family and professional roles and individual acceptance. Experiencing stressful situations in childhood especially affects our actions in adulthood. In order to maintain emotional stability, the ability to cope with stressful situations and to efficiently solve problems play an important role. It is also important to be able to distinguish important situations that may be a significant stressor from trivial situations that should not affect your well-being.

How we deal with stressful situations depends on our individual characteristics and adaptability. The ability to actively solve problems by planning actions and solutions is a great art. Unfortunately, not all of us do. However, it is the best way to deal with stress. It requires a reasonable approach to matters that are often the source of many negative feelings that throw us out of psychological balance.