Stress can definitely lead to health problems – whether this is from neighbours, work, relationships, health, finance, school or any one of a hundred other causes.<\/p>\n
An example from this site includes the questions we get from people who are really at very low or zero risk of having HIV. Often one possible exposure, produces symptoms that are related to stress and worry, but not HIV infection.<\/p>\n
Trying to deal with and resolve stressful situations will improve your life and probably your general health.<\/p>\n
However, your meds work because taking them on time makes sure there are active levels of all three drugs 24 hours a day. Even if you are stressed, the drugs will control the virus. Even if you don’t particularly believe in the meds, the active drugs will control the virus – so long as you take them on time.
\nSo long as you don’t miss doses of your meds, they will still work.<\/p>\n
One caution, is that if you are using efavirenz (Sustiva\/Stocrin) as one of your HIV drugs, this may make effects of external stress more difficult, as one of the side effects in some people is to affect mood and increase anxiety<\/a>. This may be a reason to speak to your doctor if the causes of external stress are going to take a while to sort out.<\/p>\n The HepC-UK site includes useful information on stress<\/a>.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have just started treatments but am also going through a sressful period in terms of my work and am suffering noise from a neighbour which is causing problems too.<\/p>\n I just wanted to know how much can external problems intefere with the likelihood of medications working? Has there been any research into this?<\/p>\n I’d imagine the more relaxed I was the more chance I have of the treatments working. thanks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,26,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-living-with-hiv-long-term","category-starting-treatment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}