Struggle with stress – when it get so bad it made you ill

Everyone have experienced both kinds. The good kind is the sort of stress that makes you up your game and usually ends with a great sense of achievement.

While the bad kind is the sort where everything gets on top of you, you get rundown, ill and eventually just can’t function.

Usually happens when you’re dealing with incredibly stressful things – bereavement, moving house, relationship break-ups and extreme work or financial pressure.

And making a slightly difficult dinner is enough to send my stress levels skyrocketing, so you don’t want to see what I’m like when I’m moving house.

I’ve always been one of life’s worriers, and a natural pessimist to boot. Add in a pinch of control-freak behaviour and a propensity towards anxiety, and I’m the perfect storm of stress.

I experience the good stress too. I LOVE the good stress. I can thrive under high pressure just like anyone else.

I’m especially good at dealing with work stress. Give me a tonne of work deadlines and not only will I hit every damn one, but the quality of my work will actually somehow improve. I’ll even enjoy myself.

Sure, work can burn me out and sometimes I need to take it easy, but, for some reason, I don’t seem to experience work stress the same way I experience stress in other aspects of my life.

What gets me is emotional stress, or stress in my personal life. Moving house DESTROYS me. Relationship stress stops me from being able to function in just about every aspect of my life.

But for years I failed to connect the dots on what the stress was doing to me. I thought stress was just the adrenalin rush of having a lot on your plate, or the constant nagging worry that you wouldn’t get everything done.

I realised, of course, that being exhausted was a side-effect of the stress. But what I didn’t realise was that the physical symptoms that seemed to show up every time I was stressed, WERE the stress.

I get the most ridiculous physical side-effects from stress. Headaches and colds are some of the most common, but I’d get everything from recurring tooth infections, hair loss, weight loss, weirdly sensitive teeth and receding gums (why does stress hate my teeth?) – and those are just the ones I identified pretty early on.

I started displaying some symptoms of IBS a year or so ago, but there didn’t seem to be a particular food that was causing it. Eventually I made the connection between the isolated flare-ups – stress.

I’ve had acne since I hit puberty and sometimes it’s worse than others. I tried cutting down on sugar, but that didn’t help. However, spending a week with my family doing nothing but eating sugar-heavy comfort food and playing with a dog seemed to clear my skin right up. Stress, I eventually realised, was the triggering factor – not sugar.

And don’t even get me STARTED on that ridiculous stress-induced case of recurrent thrush that lasted a good six weeks. You try de-stressing when you have thrush. It’s not easy.

The trick to managing stress is to catch it early and do what you can to de-stress. The whole ‘catching it early’ thing is what I struggle with.

Often I convince myself that I’m just a bit stressed, but I’ve got it under control. Then someone I haven’t seen for a while will helpfully point out that I look terrible and they can see all my chest bones.

Sure enough, I get home, weigh myself, realise I’m officially underweight and I have a little bald patch and wonder if, just maybe, I’m a bit more stressed than I realised.

What I need to get better at is noticing the emotional symptoms before the physical symptoms start. If I’ve already got IBS and a tooth infection then I’ve left it far too long to deal with it.

However, if I notice that I’m getting irritable and struggling to concentrate, or that I’ve had to take painkillers for three days running because my headache won’t go away, then I can step back and manage the stress before it gets totally out of hand and leads me right into an anxiety episode.

Stress on its own is not, strictly speaking, a mental illness – but it can certainly lead to one. Unchecked stress, in my case, results in anxiety. Which just releases a whole other barrel of monkeys to run roughshod over my life.

It’s only in the last year or so that I’ve started putting two and two together on a lot of these things, largely because my stress levels have escalated recently.

I spent my 20s avoiding stressful situations altogether, but now I’m a freelancer, which comes with an exciting new range of financial worries and unpredictability. Probably not ideal for a stress-head like me, but I love the work.

I don’t have all of the answers for dealing with stress (in fact, if you have the answers, please let me know), but realising that it’s something I’m prone to and struggle with is a good first step.