Why Divorce Might Be Doing Surprising Damage To Your Body

Divorce is rough. The division of assets, the broken promises, and slew of strong emotions constantly threatening to undo your poker face. It's a tough time in anyone's life. And despite the trendy "conscious uncoupling" term celebrities are using these days that implies it's a neat process, we know it can get messy. And according to a new study reported by Insider, divorce has proven to have a negative impact on both physical and mental health. The study surveyed 1,900 divorcees in Denmark. After filling out questionnaires on the nature of their divorce, their background, and their health, the results concluded that the participants' health right after a divorce was shown to be worse than average in the Danish population.

One of the most common symptoms experienced among the recent divorcees was stress, Insider claims. And according to Healthline, stress is seen to negatively affect the body's immune system, increase the risk of depression and heart attack, and encourage insomnia.

Luckily, the toll divorce plays on your overall health can be controlled to an extent. Dr. Søren Sander, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, explains to Insider the impact conflict plays on a person going through a divorce. "Across gender, higher levels of divorce conflict were found to predict worse mental health, even when accounting for other socio-demographic variables and divorce characteristics," he says. So less conflict, better overall health.

While the participants listed a slew of issues related to physical unwellness, the study, originally published in Frontiers in Psychology, showed that the largest gap between the participants and the average Danish population was in mental health. A lot of people enter into a marriage assuming it will be for the rest of their lives, and Psychreg shares that when marriage doesn't work out as expected, partners experience strong emotions that affect mental health including overwhelming anxiety, depression, rage, and hopelessness. So if you ever go through a "conscious uncoupling" or messy split, we hope you keep your health as a top priority.