Biological Influences of Stress

Biological Influences of Stress
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Biological Influences of Stress
Kaubrys et al. (2021) studied 181 college students to determine their between and within-person link between sleep and daily stress. In particular, the common causes of stress among college students are poor time management, examinations, and meeting assignment deadlines. The article also depicts that childhood maltreatment and poor quality of sleep are stressors among college students (Kaubrys et al., 2021). For example, participants who experienced childhood maltreatment had low-quality of sleep and did not feel rested upon waking up. Those with more stressors had low-quality sleep and short sleep duration.
Stress influences an individual’s genetics, hormones, and nervous system activity. As discussed above, college students are exposed to various stressors. For instance, more stress modifies a person’s deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) methylation, which alters gene expression and leads to disease phenotypes (Vidrascu et al., 2019). During stress, cortisol is produced to mobilize fatty acids and glucose to provide the required energy. However, chronic stress impairs the communication between the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the immune system. In other words, stress influenc...