Try to avoid working at night.
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Editor’s note: As everyone knows, stress can affect human health. However, the original article titled The Health Risks of Evening Stress, author Markham Heid, said that nighttime stress may lead to more and more health problems.
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If the research in the past two decades has taught doctors one thing, it is that long-term work and high-intensity stress are very harmful to human health.
Psychological stress problems can lead to a series of heart problems, such as abnormal heart structure and even heart disease. In addition, studies have found that long-term stress can disrupt the body’s immune system, endocrine system and metabolic processes, and may also lead to a series of diseases such as diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome and even cancer.
The attention of the experts is on the changes in human cortisol and hormones. Cortisol levels are elevated in people with stress or anxiety, so cortisol is often called “stress hormone.”
Professor Dr. Darlene Kertes, a professor of assistant psychology at the University of Florida, said that in addition to helping the body better cope with potential threats, cortisol Can play an anti-inflammatory role. It can maintain the inflammatory condition within a controllable range by affecting part of the immune cells.
However, at the same time, if the level of cortisol is extremely high, the hormones that normally suppress inflammation and the immune system may be disordered.
The function of cortisol is not only to inhibit the appearance of inflammation.
In healthy humans, cortisol levels rise and fall regularly throughout the day. “Usually, after 30 minutes of getting up, the level of cortisol in the body will reach its highest value,” Professor Cortes said. After that, the level of cortisol in the body usually decreases gradually until it reaches a minimum after falling asleep.
Sturs said, everyday bodyThe regular increase or decrease of cortisol levels can maintain the body’s circadian rhythm, thereby regulating sleep, appetite and cell repair. In the context of normal cortisol activity, it is not difficult to understand that at night when cortisol levels should continue to decrease, there may be an increase in cortisol levels due to a sudden increase in pressure.
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A few previous studies have shown that nighttime stress may be more harmful or more disruptive to health than morning stress.
In 2018, a report by Hokkaido University in Japan reported that the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis of the brain, the nervous system that manages the stress response of the human body, is in the morning. The reaction between the pressure and the night pressure is different. Specifically, under normal circumstances, when the body responds to stress in the morning, there will be a sudden increase in cortisol levels, which means that the human body can respond strongly to morning stress events. But if it is at night, the body’s response to stress events is relatively weak.
According to Yujiro Yamanaka, one of the authors of the study and an assistant professor at Hokkaido University, at night, if the stress response of the human body is slow, the long-term nighttime pressure may be “depleted”. The nervous system, which leads to a range of health problems such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure. He suggested that as much as possible avoid the pressure that may occur at night.
Even if the body adapts to nighttime stress with the right level of cortisol, it can still cause health-related problems. “If you are always experiencing a sudden increase in stress at night, it may disrupt the natural decline in cortisol levels during the day, which can further disrupt the quality of sleep,” Cortes said.
She said that long-term exposure to stress (not a day or week of stress, but a pressure that lasts for months or years) may result in a gentle increase or decrease in cortisol levels in the body. “You will find that morning cortisol levels do not increase, and nocturnal cortisol levels will not decrease,” Coates said. And this change will completely disrupt the physical rhythm of the body, leading to a series of health problems.
2018, another from the University of Colorado (University ofColorado’s study found that nighttime cortisol levels in obese women remained high compared to women with normal weight. However, some studies have found that nighttime cortisol levels in patients with depression will increase. In addition, there is a lot of evidence that disordered physiological rules can lead to a range of health problems.
However, although the human body may be able to cope with stress more easily in the morning, Coates mentioned that some people are questioning whether the time when stress occurs will play a key role in health. .
She also mentioned that most of the evidence shows that cortisol levels are high for a long time, no matter what time period, it is very harmful to health. “And more likely, morning stress and night stress can lead to different health problems,” she added. “But it’s hard to say that morning stress and night pressure are more harmful. I can’t decide now.” /p>
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Focus on night stress and sleep quality can also lead to a range of risks. “When there is stress at night, we know it will also affect sleep quality,” said Christopher Fagundes, a stress researcher and assistant professor at Rice University in the United States.
The quality of sleep is affected, and it is basically accompanied by a variety of conditions we know well, including depression. “We know that if people’s sleep quality is not good, the blood pressure will rise relatively the next morning, and the level of inflammation will become higher,” Fangandez said.
At the same time, Fagandes believes that it is not a big problem to always pay attention to and deal with his night pressure. However, if this happens all the time, that is, as long as there is pressure at night that will affect the quality of sleep, then this may affect the circadian rhythm of the day.
Fangandez stresses that the relationship between variables such as sleep, stress, inflammation, and cortisol presents a “two-way” trend in which one factor may affect another and vice versa. And form a vicious circle. Nighttime stress can lead to poor sleep quality, which in turn leads to a more pronounced stress response the next day, which in turn further affects sleep the next day and continues to viciously.
Although the current study of stress time is still in its infancy,Ganders suggested that we should avoid night pressure as much as possible, especially before going to sleep. For many people, this means avoiding work-related things as much as possible at night. Many studies have previously found that work at night is prone to stress or sub-health.
In addition, the study also found that using “active” forms of technology at night, such as almost any way of communicating with others, such as sending messages or browsing social media, can easily affect sleep quality.
As Cotes said, no matter what is discovered, there will always be doubts about the existence of sound. However, at night, night pressure will eventually prove to be the most harmful of all forms of stress.
Translator: Ishii Junichi