Since 1992 April has been stress awareness month, stress can have a physical and emotional impact on an individual

There are many ways to combat stress and help improve the physical effects.

I spoke to Richard Holmes, a well being expert,  about stress in the work place and in day to day life and how to combat it.

You may think stress is a temporary emotion, but long-term stress can alter your genes, a new study has found. Stress can affect the way your genes are expressed, in other words different parts of your coding can be switched on or off depending on environmental factors like stress.

For instance, stress can activate an immune response that then leads to inflammation over time, inflammation and swelling can be linked to all sorts of issues like acne, rashes and more serious health problems like heart disease and arthritis.

Stress has also been named as one of the main contributors to insomnia, stress causes hyper arousal that makes drifting off to sleep, and staying asleep, considerably harder. Insomnia can lead to a number of mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

All these impacts are worrying and unfortunately women are more prone to the physical effects of stress. But men are not immune to stress, in fact men suppress the physical symptoms so much that it may impact their emotional health in the long run.

But before all this research pushes you over the edge, don’t fret! There are many solutions that can reduce the effects of long term stress and give you better ways of coping with life’s struggles.

Mediation and other forms of mental relaxation has been proven to be one of the best long-term coping mechanisms for stress. Audio meditations are available on Spotify and other music services.