Did you know that the stress of a bad marriage, separation, divorce and the subsequent financial problems can kill you? Ladies, as you live through the divorce process, you need to take care of your children but you also need to take care of you! If your diet is not a good one and you are eating things that don’t help your health, stop eating them! If you need to lose some weight, lose it! If you don’t get much exercise, start getting exercise!
You have a life and you have a future. Your children hopefully, want you around to be their mother or their children’s grandmother. You need to focus on your own mental and physical health during these trying times. Please take heed, this is for real!
The article, Marital Stress Linked to Heart Disease, published in HealthDay News on October 23, 2007 states the following:
There are well documented differences in the ways that men and women talk and relate to one another, so finding gender-linked differences related to heart risks makes sense to me,said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, professor and director of the Division of Health Psychology at Ohio State University College of Medicine. She and husband Ronald Glaser, an Ohio State professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics, have collaborated on a series of studies over the years, examining the ways stress can affect the human immune system. Some of their work has focused on the body’s ability to heal from wounds after exposure to stressful situations. One study found that a married couple’s typical argument can delay wound healing by at least a day. Highly hostile couples healed at rates that were 60 percent lower than those with lesser hostility levels.
Study leader, Tim Smith, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah and his colleagues, discovered that levels of calcification (atherosclerosis, often referred to as hardening of the arteries) were particularly high among those women whose husbands were hostile. Among husbands, atherosclerosis was more common when they or their wives acted in a controlling manner.
A word to the wise, ladies, please entertain the thought that, for the first time in your married life, you need and must begin to think about your own health. You need to start taking care of you!
