Here's a guide to the areas stress hits most often, and simple steps you can take to relieve the pain:

Low-back pain
Back pain can be caused by many different factors, such as poor posture or pressure on the spine from long hours of sitting. But a classic Swedish study of low-back pain in the workplace more than a decade ago showed that women who reported signs of stress such as dissatisfaction, worry and fatigue were more likely to experience low-back pain than those who had physical stressors like doing a lot of lifting. More recently, researchers at Ohio State University found that when volunteers felt stressed (from a snippy lab supervisor criticizing them as they tried lifting an object at a certain rate of speed), they used their back muscles in ways that made them more susceptible to injury. "I expect you'd see this even more in the real world, where stress is experienced over long periods and you care more about your task," says study co-author Catherine Heaney, Ph.D., associate professor of public health. To ease the twinge of low-back pain:

- Stand with your heels and shoulders touching a wall. Tilt your pelvis so that the small of your back presses against the wall, relieving back muscles. Hold for 15-30 seconds. Do this exercise regularly to reduce your risk of getting back pain or to relieve existing pain.

- Strengthen your abdominal muscles, which support the spine, by doing crunches three times per week. Lie flat on your back on an exercise mat with hands cupped behind your ears. Feet should be together and flat on the floor, with knees bent at about a 45-degree angle. Curl your upper torso up, bringing ribs in toward hips until your shoulder blades clear the floor. Do one set of 15-25 crunches; gradually build to three sets. Also, increase endurance of the muscles along the spine, the spinal erectors, by doing alternate leg and arm raises from an all-fours position, holding each position for eight counts. Initially, do one set of 10 repetitions, building up to three sets.