Posts Tagged ‘ Fight-or-flight response ’

Dealing With Stress In Your Everyday Life

December 1, 2011
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Dealing With Stress In Your Everyday Life

by Peter Shaw

What is Stress?

Stress is a response produced by your body when you are subjected to various types of demand, whether physically, mentally, or emotionally. Contrary to what most people believe, stress is not associated with the negative only since excessive positive emotions can result to stress as well. When something that takes place or is about to take place in the environment is producing stress in a person’s body, it results into the release of certain chemicals into your bloodstream.

On the positive side, these chemicals can be utilized to produce more energy or added strength. This is helpful when the cause of your stress is something physical. But when you are dealing with emotional stress, it can cause a negative effect on your body since there is no outlet for releasing that extra boost of energy and strength. Therefore, stress results to various types of emotional or physical responses because each individual’s body respond differently to the stimulus.

Types and Causes of Stress

Whether you admit it or not, stress is a part of everyday life. Whether you are at school, at the office, or just about anywhere you are forced to deal with people and the environment. Hence, the types of stress is closely associated with its cause. And because your physical body is closely connected to your emotional and mental state, you will notice some connection to their effects when you begin to experience stress. This is also the reason why it is important to combat the cause of stress since it affects several vital aspects of your body in order to function.

Here are some of the most common sources of stress that must be dealt with on an everyday basis.

Internal Stress

There are times when you constantly worry about certain events without having enough control to determine its outcome. Internal stress is also one of those kinds of stress that needs to be addressed quickly. Most of the source of stress is rooted in the person’s mind, which makes it difficult to manage and would entail more work to get rid of. Oftentimes, people suffering from internal stress subconsciously puts themselves in stressful situations or feel stressed out about things that aren’t stressful to begin with.

Survival Stress

This type of stress deals with the danger, mostly physical, that an individual is subjected to. It can be prompted by an attack made by either human or animal that could potentially hurt you in the process. Therefore, your body releases this burst of energy that you need to utilize to respond quickly about the situation at hand whether to confront it or escape from it.

Environmental Stress

This type of stress is your body’s way of responding to changes or activities in your environment that could produce stress, such as extreme levels of noise or pressure from work. As compared to the other types of stress already mentioned above, this one is a lot easier to deal with. The best way to get started combating this stress type is to determine the source. Once you have identified the source of environmental stress, find a way to avoid them.

Stress Due To Work and Fatigue

Another common type of stress and probably the most prevalent. This one though does not happen in an instant, but rather builds up over time. When you are spending too much time working or forced to deal with excessive amount of work, then it can take its toll on your body. To deal with work stress, you need to make sure you have enough rest and relaxation in between so your body can recover from the tremendous amount of work. There are relaxation methods that you can apply in order to find relief from stress.

 

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The Causes of Stress

October 7, 2011
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Panic attack

Image via Wikipedia

What is stress ?

There are a wide variety of potential stressors (causes of stress), and these can be both external and internal.  Furthermore, different stressors affect  people to different degrees.  A dressing down by a boss at work, for example, might be treated as a minor incident by you, but it would stress me out.  I would immediately perceive the threat of loss (in this case my livelihood).

Some external sources of stress might include pressure, deadlines or conflict in the work environment, the family (any number of potential stressors here!), money issues, care of aged parents, or they might be things over which we have little or no control, such as traffic, long commutes, violence, crime, simple misunderstandings, and much more besides.

Some authorities contend that stress is a natural reaction to our inadequate or perceived inadequate response to some threatening situation, which may involve personal loss of some kind (reputation, a family member, your job, the high opinion of your friends, a bereavement or life threatening illness, a robbery, rape or other crime – the list goes on).  In such situations the body naturally goes into a “fight or flight” response, which because flight is not usually an option for most of us, results in the body being flooded with adrenalin with no means of dissipating it.

The signs of stress are usually self evident, and will be dealt with in more detail in a later article.

It is important to realize that not all stress is bad for us.  In many cases, some degree of stress can be beneficial, such as in a sports situation, for example.  Furthermore, even though extreme stress can be very unpleasant and result in potentially devastating events such as panic attacks, the effect is not usually long term and there are a variety of options to choose from in dealing with stress, depending upon the stressor in question.

One of the central problems in dealing with that stress which is chronic, however, is its potential for creating long term behavioural problems for us, usually because we try to find relief in essentially short term and short-sighted ways.  These might include alcohol, tobacco and substance abuse and/or addictions, loss of self esteem and self confidence, memory disorders, somatic disorders, insomnia, food abuse, and  short temperedness.

 

 

 

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