BATON ROUGE — Stress can affect your body, mind and behavior.

Recognizing symptoms can help you manage your stress and prevent health issues like high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, obesity and diabetes.

Stress can activate your body's "fight-or-flight response." When your brain senses a threat, it signals your body to release hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones make your heart race, raise blood pressure and boost energy.

"Physically, this can lead to headaches. For people, this can lead to poor sleep. It can affect someone's ability to concentrate," Mayo Clinic’s Doctor of Family Medicine Summer Allen said.

Dr. Allen says managing stress depends on each person's individual needs.

"Stress is often going to be our body's response to a certain trigger to a certain situation, so ways to respond are going to need to be personalized," Dr. Allen said

You can manage stress by journaling, meditation, reading a book or physical activity.

"Another strategy for managing stress would be considering yoga," Dr. Allen said.

She says you should make changes one step at a time.

"If we try to change everything all at once, we end up setting ourselves up for further stress or feeling overwhelmed," she said.