Stress is a psychological term that means an unpleasant state of emotional and physiological arousal and experiences in situations where people feel that their happiness is threatened to danger. The word stress means different from different people. Some people define stress as an event or situation that makes you feel negative emotions such as strain, stress, anxiety and anger. Other people see stress as a response to these situations. This response includes physiological changes such as heart rate and muscle tension, and changes in emotion and behavior. However, most psychologists consider stress as a process involving human interpretation and reaction to threatening events.
Stress is a common experience. You may be stressed at a very busy time, observe important deadlines to meet, it may take too long to finish all your work. Frequently it is stressful due to workplace or social relationship problems such as bad evaluation by supervisor and discussion with friends. In situations with a threat of failure or personal humiliation, there are people who are particularly susceptible to stress. Others emphasize when they encounter or think of these threats, feeling the extreme fear of objects and things related to physical threats such as illness, storm, flight of airplane. An important life event, for example the death of a loved one, can cause severe stress.
If not properly managed, stress can lead to serious health problems. Exposure to certain stresses can contribute to both physical disorders such as heart disease and psychiatric disorders such as anxiety disorders. The field of health psychology focuses in part on how stress affects physical functions and how people use stress management techniques to prevent or minimize disease.
Stress-inducing situations are called stressors. Stress is different in severity and duration.
Stress factors can be divided into three general categories:
- · Fatal events
- · Major life changes
- · Everyday confusion
Also, thinking about unpleasant past events and anticipating unpleasant future events may stress many people.
How does stress affect you?
People who are feeling stress are worried, difficult to concentrate and to remember. Stress can also change outward behavior. Tooth clamping, hand squeezing, pacing, nail biting, severe breathing are common symptoms of stress. When I feel stress, I feel that people are physically different. Butterflies in the stomach, cold limbs, dry mouth, and heart rate are all the physiological effects of stress, we associate with feelings of anxiety.
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Physicians increasingly acknowledge that stress is a factor contributing to a wide variety of health problems. These problems include cardiovascular disorders such as hypertension (hypertension); gastrointestinal disorders such as coronary heart disease and ulcers. Stress is also considered a risk factor in cancer, chronic pain problems, and many other health problems.
Researchers clearly identify the distinctive ways of people who respond to stress as stress factors, specifically the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The release of stress hormone has a cumulative negative effect on the heart and blood vessels.
Stress management
To cope with stress, it means using lower thoughts and actions to cope with stressful situations and lowering the stress level. Many people have specific ways to deal with stress based on their personality. People who agree well with stress often tend to believe that they can influence what happens to you personally. They usually make more positive remarks about themselves, resist dissatisfaction, remain optimistic, and continue tolerate even under very adverse circumstances. The most important thing is to choose the right strategy to deal with the stress factors they face. On the contrary, people suffering from stress tend to have somewhat opposite personality traits, such as a decline in self-esteem or a pessimistic view of life.
Psychologists distinguish between two broad coping strategies: coping with problems and coping with focusing on emotions. The goal of both strategies is to control one stress level. In addressing the problem, we try to short negative emotions by taking some action to correct, avoid, or minimize the threat situation. You must change your behavior to cope with stressful situations. In empathy-focused coping, it is necessary to directly relax or eliminate incompetent feelings. An example of how to focus on emotions is to rethink the situation in an honest way and to rethink relaxation, denial, wishful thinking, and so on.
Besides that, the other two major relaxation methods are progressive muscle relaxation and meditation. Gradual muscle relaxation involves systematically straining and then relaxing the different groups of muscles and directing attention to the contrasting sensation produced by the two treatments. After practicing progressive muscle relaxation, it becomes increasingly sensitive to rising tension, and you can create a relaxation reaction during daily activities.
Meditation is designed to achieve subjective goals like contemplation, wisdom, and altered consciousness, in addition to teaching relaxation. Some forms have an eastern religious and spiritual legacy based on Zen Buddhism and Yoga. Other varieties emphasize specific lifestyles for practitioners. Transcendental meditation, one of the most common meditation, concerns about focusing and repeating attention to mantras, which are words, sounds, or phrases that are considered to have a particularly restful nature.
Both progressive muscle relaxation and meditation definitely reduce stress related arousal. They have been successfully used to treat a range of stress related disorders including hypertension, migraine and tension headache, and chronic pain.
