Stress and Anxiety
Stress and anxiety are both normal emotional responses. For example, a person may experience stress when facing external triggers like a work deadline, an argument with a loved one, discrimination, or heavy traffic. These things or situations in the environment cause delay and inconvenience to a person. On the other hand, anxiety is caused by persistent worrying and overthinking, even without the physical presence of the stressor.
There is enough medical data to believe stress can affect a person’s physical health. For example, prolonged exposure to stress may lead to bloating, abdominal pain, and migraines. In addition, patients clinically diagnosed as depressed reported frequent episodes of diarrhea and IBM. Because of this, experts hypothesized that stress and anxiety can also cause diverticulitis.
Several studies that tried to quantify the possible causes of diverticulitis show that 60% of the factors are due to environmental reasons. For example, anxiety attacks and exposure to stressors may flare up and heighten the symptoms of diverticulitis.
