Stress is bad for your health. And bad health causes a lot of stress.
Poor health and disability are common among people who say they suffer from a lot of stress, according to a national poll by NPR, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.
And it's not just those whose own health is poor. Serious illness and injury often impose enormous stress on entire families.
Meet Staci Moritz, a 44-year-old mother of three young boys from Portland, Ore.
She describes her life as "pretty idyllic" until about five years ago. Then her marriage foundered and she and her husband separated. Four years ago she got laid off from her job. And the next day, the biggest blow fell.
"About 8 o'clock at night I received a call from one of the hospitals here in Portland," Moritz recalls.
Her husband was in the emergency room, terribly injured. Cycling home from work, he'd been hit by a car and dragged underneath the vehicle for 30 feet.
He suffered profound brain injury that put him in a coma for three weeks. He didn't die, but for a long time it wasn't clear if he would ever recover.
"His functional ability at the time was that of an infant," Moritz says. "He couldn't speak. He lay in bed, surrounded by netting so he wouldn't fall out, in diapers."
And then, one day, he turned a corner.
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