Mental health conditions, such as anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder, can significantly affect the way you live your daily life in many ways. It can make social relationships and employment more difficult. One of the lesser-known effects of chronic mental health symptoms is how it affects the immune system.
The immune system is the body’s defense against germs, diseases, and other foreign invaders. When the immune system is compromised or altered, it can attack healthy cells, worsen infections, and even increase the likelihood of fatal diseases.
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Sleep Quality
Sleep is crucial for overall health, but especially for the immune system. While sleeping, the body rests, allowing you to fight off illnesses or injuries better. Mental health conditions like insomnia, depression, and anxiety may affect the quality or duration of your sleep, which limits the effectiveness of your immune system. Your body can’t rest properly, which makes your immune system work harder but less effectively.
Illness Susceptibility
Conditions like anxiety increase stress, releasing hormones like cortisol that actively limit your immune system’s capabilities. When your immune system is in ‘low power mode,’ you’re more susceptible to catching illnesses, even conditions like the common cold. In the age of COVID-19 dangers, the increased chance of catching illnesses can be pretty deadly and debilitating.
Illness Durability
With a weakened immune system due to chronic stress or other mental health conditions, you’re not just more susceptible to catching an illness—the illness is also stronger. Any disease or illness you catch has a greater likelihood of lasting longer, being resistant to antibiotics or vaccines, and causing more severe symptoms.
Severe Infections
Since stress, depression, and other mental health conditions can affect cortisol levels, which reduce the effectiveness of your immune system, infections can be more severe. A weakened immune system makes infections deadlier and more challenging to overcome. The symptoms and pain from these infections are also likely to be more extreme.
Fatal conditions, like sepsis, can become likelier with a weakened or altered immune system due to chronic mental health conditions. Sepsis occurs when the immune system overreacts to an infection or injury. How long does it take to die from sepsis with a weakened immune system? Not long—it could take mere hours.
Gut Health
In the digestive tract, healthy intestinal bacteria help make the digestive process smoother and more regular. However, anxiety and mental health conditions can disrupt the natural gut biome, leading to stomach pain, diarrhea, and even chronic conditions like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
Chronic stress can increase the chances of developing chronic diarrhea, which is bad for the digestive system and your overall health, increasing the risk of colon cancer or other life-threatening diseases.
Chronic Pain
Mental health conditions such as depression can make you more perceptible to pain, which can make chronic pain conditions worse. Immune system problems can increase inflammation throughout the body, further contributing to chronic pain. Mental health and chronic pain often go hand in hand, with one condition affecting the other.
Autoimmune Conditions
Your mental health can affect the severity and likelihood of autoimmune conditions. Diseases like sarcoidosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and Chron’s disease are all autoimmune disorders that are negatively affected by stress or other mental health symptoms.
High stress, impaired sleep, and hormone imbalances can make autoimmune symptoms more painful and more prevalent, increasing the risk of a flare-up.
Vaccination Effectiveness
Certain psychiatric disorders have shown a reduced efficiency in vaccination effectiveness. Since the immune system is altered through some mental health conditions, you may find a lower antibody response and inefficient overall immune response to a vaccine.
Reduced vaccine efficiency can make you more susceptible to those diseases. Further, if mental health symptoms like stress increase inflammation, localized vaccine symptoms can worsen, such as injection site pain or fever.
Joint Health
Chronic inflammation wears joints down. Since stress and sleep quality are often significant symptoms of mental health disorders, the likelihood of increased inflammation due to immune system imbalances is high.
When the body’s joints are worn down, they aren’t as flexible, cause more pain, and can’t support weight. The risk of joint problems is increased with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, which attacks the joints. Stress also affects the prevalence and intensity of these conditions.
Nurturing Both Mind and Immunity
Mental health disorders do far more than just add emotional hardships and trauma to daily life. Symptoms of mental health disorders lead to hormonal imbalance and inflammation, which can cause pain, autoimmune disorders, and lower sleep quality.
Chronic mental health conditions can also weaken the immune system, making diseases and infections easier to catch and far deadlier. Mental health can exacerbate or increase the likelihood of developing autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn’s disease.
Your mental health even plays a role in gut health and joint health. It’s essential to seek medical care for mental health symptoms as soon as they appear and get regular mental health checkups to ensure the brain is performing the way it should.
