We've all felt it. Sometimes stress can be a positive force, motivating you to perform well at your piano recital or job interview. But often — like when you're stuck in traffic — it's a negative force. If you experience stress over a lengthen period of time, it could become continuing — unless you take action.
When stress starts interfering with your ability to live a normal life for an extended period, it becomes even more dangerous. The longer the stress lasts, the worse it is for both your mind and body. You might feel fatigued, unable to concentrate or irritable for no good reason, for example. But chronic stress causes wear and tear on your body, too.
Identify what's causing stress. Monitor your state of mind throughout the day. If you feel stressed, write down the cause, your thoughts and your mood. Once you know what's bothering you, develop a plan for addressing it. That might mean setting more reasonable expectations for yourself and others or asking for help with household responsibilities, job assignments or other tasks. List all your commitments, assess your priorities and then eliminate any tasks that are not absolutely essential.
At the most basic level, stress is our body’s response to pressures from a situation or life event. What contributes to stress can vary hugely from person to person and differs according to our social and economic circumstances, the environment we live in and our genetic makeup. Some common features of things that can make us feel stress include experiencing something new or unexpected, something that threatens your feeling of self, or feeling you have little control over a situation.1
The American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey discovered that recent stress levels in the U.S. population are 4.9 on a 10-point scale, with 10 being the highest level of stress. The most common stress sources are money, work, the economy, family responsibilities, and health concerns.
Stress is actually useful. Without stress, we would not be here to talk about stress. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors did not experience some stress when that lion was roaming around their sleeping quarters, or when those red berries looked good but also emitted a strange odor, they would have been eaten or poisoned. Hence, our ancestors experienced stress and used it to their advantage so that they could procreate, allowing us to have this discussion today.
Unfortunately, there are equally as many reasons why stress is bad. Whereas mild stressors—such as what to get your spouse for his or her birthday—are motivating, major stressors can be debilitating. For instance, caring for a loved one who has a chronic illness is a serious stressor. Chronic or major stressors are extremely taxing on the brain and the body, possibly leading to depression and other mental health consequences, as well as physical health issues.
Stress is intimately tied to our social world. Social stress, such as feelings of loneliness or isolation, takes a toll on the brain and body. These forms of stress can lead to depression, anxiety, and heart disease.
You’re sitting in traffic, late for an important meeting, watching the minutes tick away. Your hypothalamus, a tiny control tower in your brain, decides to send out the order: Send in the stress hormones! These stress hormones are the same ones that trigger your body’s “fight or flight” response. Your heart races, your breath quickens, and your muscles ready for action. This response was designed to protect your body in an emergency by preparing you to react quickly. But when the stress response keeps firing, day after day, it could put your health at serious risk.
Stress is a natural physical and mental reaction to life experiences. Everyone expresses stress from time to time. Anything from everyday responsibilities like work and family to serious life events such as a new diagnosis, war, or the death of a loved one can trigger stress. For immediate, short-term situations, stress can be beneficial to your health. It can help you cope with potentially serious situations. Your body responds to stress by releasing hormones that increase your heart and breathing rates and ready your muscles to respond.
Feeling stressed can feel perfectly normal, especially during exam time. You might notice that sometimes being stressed-out motivates you to focus on your work, yet at other times, you feel incredibly overwhelmed and can’t concentrate on anything. While stress affects everyone in different ways, there are two major types of stress: stress that’s beneficial and motivating — good stress — and stress that causes anxiety and even health problems — bad stress. Here’s more on the benefits and side effects of stress and how to tell if you’re experiencing too much stress.
According to experts, stress is a burst of energy that basically advises you on what to do. In small doses, stress has many advantages. For instance, stress can help you meet daily challenges and motivates you to reach your goals. In fact, stress can help you accomplish tasks more efficiently. It can even boost memory.
Stress is key for survival, but too much stress can be detrimental. Emotional stress that stays around for weeks or months can weaken the immune system and cause high blood pressure, fatigue, depression, anxiety and even heart disease. In particular, too much epinephrine can be harmful to your heart. It can change the arteries and how their cells are able to regenerate.
One of the difficulties with stress is that people experience stress in different ways. This contributes to stress manifesting itself differently. So it would be wrong to over generalise when giving advice on how to identify stress in others. However, what we can say is that because stress has negative effects, it will usually manifest itself one way or another. Stress targets the weakest part of our physiology or character; if you are prone to headaches or eczema, this will flare up. If you have low levels of patience or tolerance for others, this will be the first area to present under times of stress. Stress isn’t avoidable but it is manageable. A key action in order to minimise risk is to identify stress-related problems as early as possible, so that action can be taken before serious stress-related illness occurs. There will be changes in the stressed person. These changes may be emotional, physical or behavioural, or a combination of all three. So, the key thing is to look out for negative changes of any kind. Bear in mind that the negative changes are also likely to have knock-on effects e.g. reduced performance at work. Of course, we all experience ‘bad days’, so we are really talking about situations where people display these negative changes for a period of time (e.g. 5 days in a row). Prolonged stress undoubtedly makes people ill. It is now known to contribute to heart disease, hypertension and high blood pressure, it affects the immune system, is linked to strokes, IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), ulcers, diabetes, muscle and joint pain, miscarriage, allergies, alopecia and even premature tooth loss.
Most people recognize that stress is not healthy but most fail to realize the significant impact stress can have on both physiological and psychological well-being. Estimates vary, but experts believe about 70% of doctor visits and 80% of serious illnesses may be exacerbated or linked to stress. Whether it is an acute bout of frustration, as experienced when cut off in traffic, or a major life event such as a divorce, losing one’s job, or being diagnosed with a disease, stress can negatively affect all systems of the human body. Interestingly, even though stress is an innate response it varies by person. Stress is heavily rooted in perception; one individual’s unpleasant experience can be another’s enjoyable undertaking. Essentially, stress can produce positive or negative metabolic and hormonal responses based on the internal environment and the balance maintained between the stress itself and recovery measures to attenuate its response (e.g., proper nutrition, sleep, and stress management techniques). Adequate stress, whether physical or mental, is needed to promote adaptations in a bodily system; while excessive stress results in systemic breakdown. Eustress is the term utilized to describe appropriate stress routinely applied for the provision of positive adaptive outcomes; distress describes an excessive level of stress that promotes negative outcomes.
According to an article on the concept of eustress in the World Journal of Medical Sciences, eustress and distress may occur at the same time when you first encounter a stressor. Eustress is more likely to prevail, however, if you had positive experiences and outcomes with stress in the past. Other important factors that help you view and respond positively to a stressful situation include:
Once the stressor is gone, eustress leaves you upbeat or exhilarated rather than dejected. When the stress is over, your stress system is turned down and you return to your former state of balance. If, however, you stay on high alert and remain revved up instead, your good stress can evolve into the symptoms of negative stress.
Many aspects of life can cause stress, such as money problems, work issues or difficult relationships. When a person is stressed, it can get in the way of managing responsibilities, which in turn can pile on yet more pressure. Having to cope with illness can compound these sorts of stresses.
The human brain has been described as the most complex object in the universe. And, because we all have unique experiences from which we develop our personalities, the complexity of human emotional life is immense.