Stress – Stress is not necessarily bad to our organism, stress is a release of three hormones called adrenaline, cortisol, norepinephrine which this are released at the time when our body feels under pressure or even attacked. The time when stress becomes bad for our health is when we spend long periods of time under stress. Stress as mentioned before can be detonated at the time of being under big pressure, when we are in a dangerous situation. It is actually one of the most helpful release of hormones because it makes us more efficient, faster, alert and even become more focused on the task or activity we are doing at the time. As said in dictionaries, stress is an emotional tension due to a demanding circumstance. The way I can relate stress in my daily life is almost every day of my life, I have stress mostly because of getting work done at my high- school, this is sometimes due to the fact that I get work done at the last minute, and this gets me under a lot of pressure because of getting it done quickly and in the best way possible. Another time I get this feeling of stress is during a dangerous situation, for example, one time I was shopping in a mall in San Pedro and suddenly gunfire started to go off, and the first thing I did was going into a store and hiding, but the thing is that I reacted to fast, because of the releasing of adrenaline and this are the ways that in my life stress can happen. There are three types of effects that stress can have an effect in our body which are physical, emotional and behavioral. The physical effect side is that our body can have severe headaches, muscular pain in the whole body, chest pain, breathing issues, laziness or fatigue, stomach pain, detention of digestive system and sleeping problems. The emotional side effects of stress are large periods of anxiety, lack of motivation, lack of focus, being overwhelmed, being irritable, angry, sad, severe mood changes, and in some cases even
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depression. The behavioural side effects of stress are anger explosions, drug intoxication, alcoholic intoxication, the use of tobacco, being lonely, meaning staying away of society and not doing the sufficient exercise for the body to be healthy. So some of the examples I gave to stress may not be the most severe but at some point they can certainly be very damaging to our complete system. Some of the things we saw during the semester of Human Development is that stress can be good for our system but at some point it can and will be damaging to our organism, some ways I could release some stress are calmly eating something, going for a walk, take some air, or simply relaxing in a way that it wont affect my effectivity or life. We saw in HD that stress, as all things in life can be managed, but we need to know the correct way of how managing it, we can manage it in good things as mentioned before but we can try to manage it into bad activities such as alcohol and tobacco.
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Legal and Ilegal Drugs- There is a very big gap between legal and illegal drugs, it is quite big actually, speaking legal terms, a legal drug is prescripted by a certified doctor, the manufacturing of this kind of drugs is legal, but only legal when certified by your countries health department (Food and Drug Administration / Secretaria de Salud), the distribution and selling of this product is authorized but controlled and the consumption is not harmful to our organisms but like everything in excess it can cause serious damage. On the other side, we have illegal drugs, and here is why there is a very large gap between both. Illegal drugs are not authorized by no organization or country department such as (World Health Organization, FDA, SALUD), the manufacturing of this products are clandestine, are controlled usually by criminal organizations, often called cartels, these are sold discretely in mostly streets. $ In my daily life I can’t relate too much to illegal drugs because I do not consume obviously and I have not had encounters of people trying to sell me an illicit drug, but with what I can relate is when I traveled to Tanzania, Africa, because it is Africa, there are certain infectious diseases in the area such as malaria, yellow fever, and others, I had to take an anti-malaria medicine called
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Doxcycyline, this like a vaccine against malaria, but the difference is that it is ingested orally, the point is, that this drug is legal, it is authorized by the government and I can buy it at a pharmacy, with a paper signed by a medic, as differentiated with illegal drugs we can maybe buy them in the corner of our street by a stranger and we would buying an unauthorized product and self damage ourselves. $ The consequences of illegal and legal drugs, again, there is a very big gap between these two because they have very different effects, they are fabricated by different kinds of people and many other reasons. The consequences of consumption of a legal drug are mostly good because you are taking them with the purpose of healing something that you feel, you are taking it because your physician told you to take it in order to be healthy, obviously in excess this can result in fatality. Illegal drugs have very very few good consequences, the most know positive consequence is cannabis, it is allegedly said to be healthy to our organism but in my personal opinion it isn’t, drugs like cocaine, heroine, crack, meth and other can result in serious disorders or even death. $ Something we learned about drugs and how can we can apply it in our daily life is abstinence and being mentally aware of the consequences, and I am talking about the ilegal ones because I think this ones don’t bring anything good to our lives, it can cause us problems in our personal lives, such as in our relationships, our family, it can affect us in our professional lives and educational lives in way that we could and very probably lose our jobs or be expelled from our institution cause of the drugs, it brings damage and it is harmful to our health.
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Gambling – Gambling may not sound as a very severe issue in people but in fact it is, gambling is not good in any way since you can lose a lot in this activity, we can lose money and sometimes our lives. The psychiatric term for this disorder is called Ludopathy, this means the disorder and uncontrollable desire of gambling, this dives into the card games, poker, blackjack, sports betting, bingo, lottery and slots. This disorder is recognized by the subsidiary of the United Nations the World Health Organization and by several United States agencies. A person with this
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disease has symptoms such as not resisting to play, excessive tension before playing, pleasure and relief at the time of playing. There are many causes that generate this problem such as family, past members of your family like your parents, grandparents, etc, it actually can be a hereditary disorder, it can also be related to a lack of educational issue at the time of being raised, problems with your own family like lack of communication, it starts at the time when you have patterns of spending money inappropriately and mood disorders. $ This case does not apply completely to my life because I don’t gamble in my regular basis, sometimes in very special occasions I play poker or blackjack with my friends with real money I personally have not had any problems with this because I like playing and I am very good at these games, so I usually don’t lose, but these doesn’t mean that I use this skill in my life very often, no, I like the game but I play it every once in a long while. I have friends that I’ve been told by them that they have a problem with gambling and I think they suffer from this disorder because they keep playing and playing and despite the fact that they lose money, they keep playing and losing their money, they have debts with older people and my friend are my age. $ Some of the consequences that can bring the addiction of gambling are devastating to the person with this disorder because you can go from being a wealthy person, with a good house, nice cars, etc, to a poor, low economic level living, you can go from rich to poor in matter of weeks, or even days. There is something that these people usually say, it is “ the next one will be the big one” or something like that and this is the phrase that will probably get you to a bad result. The consequences of this disorder is losing, you lose money, dignity, valor, and it can get you in problems with your family, some people can get to the point in which they can’t give enough food to their family. $ The way I learned in Human Development class that I can apply to not be like this is that we have to get to know our limits and what is good and bad for us, the way that the teacher taught us is that we have so much to lose in this game, we can lose a lot of things and we can get to have devastating effects in our personal and professional lives.
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Social Network – Social networking was created with the purpose of being able to communicate without being physically present, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and others. But they can come to have bad effects in our lives, this only happens when we use it in a proper and responsible way. It can be dangerous also, it can put in risk our lives by our digital actions. $ Something that I’ve known of cases of friends is sexting, the process of sending intimate pictures to a stranger is actually dangerous because you don’t know the intentions that that person may have or may do with those pictures, in my school (San Roberto) there was a 2001 generation girl who sent pictures and it went viral to the 01 and 02 generations, I sincerely feel bad for her because she went through a lot of things after that happened, she suffered bullying, depression, self-esteem problems and she had to finally move of city, so she could have a fresh start. My point is that this can have terrible consequences, another case I’ve known is predators in the networks, I’ve seen some videos that they make a social experiment that a parent and the producers “prank” the child and they start talking to them by Facebook and they make think the child they are his/hers friend, so at one point they ask the minor to go out for example to a park, and the production perform a kind of kidnap to the child, and then the child meets with the parent, this is all with the intention of giving a heads up for the people that do not have the enough knowledge about this topic and that may be in risk or danger. I have not had any situation or problem with social networking.$ Some of the consequences that this can bring is as mentioned previously can be bullying, depression, kidnapping, death, suicide, there are literally TV shows that stream this kind of cases in which a person is severely affected by a group of people or individual. Social networks can affect us in all the aspects of life, they can affect our family by having an extreme lack of communication because of being with our devices in times that are made for bonding or having a time with family, they also can affect us professionally or educationally, because they lower our efficiency rate, they keep us away of our tasks, it makes us do our work mediocrely, makes us have focusing problems at the time of taking notes
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during a class, etc, it also makes us socially isolated, people say it is meant for the opposite but sometimes and in some cases it is the opposite because we are so close to our devices that we just want to spend time with them and leave our physical social lives away. $ In some activities in Human Development class I talked about this, and it is basically all about self choice, if we want to move forward and not be dominated by the social networks, our generations are fanatics of technology and this is making a world change, but not in a positive, in a negative way. A way I can apply this in my life is by doing more activities that will keep me away from my cell phone and spend more time with people that keep me busy. Word Count: 568
Honor Code: “ I hereby affirm that I’ve completed this activity with academic integrity” – Pablo Olivas Iturralde Room: 1205 ID: 581894
Final Word Count: 2,178 words
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