How Your Past Life Can Bite You Back
Growing up is essentially a hard thing to do. People deal with all sorts of problems such as family, financial, and parental issues. The important thing is how we recover from them.
However, recovering from how one grows up is a lot more complicated than previously thought of.
Researchers have discovered that troubled times, caused by either socially or financially, can lead into an increase of disease risk factors as one ages.
According to Per E. Gustafsson, from Umea University in Sweden, growing up and facing social and financial trials during one's adolescence and early adulthood is linked to having higher rates of getting a disease when a person reaches middle age.
Some of the effects that a person can get from his troubled past include higher blood pressure, body weight, and cholesterol.
The authors of the study looked at social factors and material deprivation, its influences during adolescence and adulthood, and the wear and tear on the body from trying to cope with such stressors.
This effort to cope with stress is called the "allostatic load," which is thought to predict various health problems, including declines in physical and cognitive functioning, cardiovascular disease, and mortality.
In their research, Gustafsson and his team analyzed data from 822 participants in the Northern Swedish Cohort. They followed the subjects from their age of 16 o the age of 27. Factors that they considered were social adversity, social isolation, exposure to threat and violence and material adversity.
In addition to this, the team also examined allostatic load at age 43 based on 12 biological factors to cardiovascular regulation, body fat deposition, lipid metabolism, glucose, metabolism, inflammation and neuroendocrine regulation.
They discovered that challenges met early in life translate to adverse life circumstances later in adulthood. Results show that adolescence is a particularly sensitive period for men. For women who had experienced trials during their adolescence, and for men who had a troubled adulthood, they had greater allostatic load at the age of 43.
But still, problems are unavoidable in life, and how we deal with them may help. According to ReachOut.com, bottling all your problems can make situations harder, instead, it is better to do something that allows you to release stress.
A few things that one can do to release some of this stress is to talk it out, write it down, draw, talking to a counselor, or simply doing something that you enjoy.