What Is Stress?

Stress is the emotional and physical strain caused by our response to pressure from the outside world. Common stress reactions include tension, irritability, inability to concentrate, and a variety of physical symptoms that include headache and a fast heartbeat.

Symptoms of Stress

There are several signs and symptoms that you may notice when you are experiencing stress. These signs and symptoms fall into four categories: Feelings, Thoughts, Behavior, and Physiology.

Causes of stress

The potential causes of stress are numerous and highly individual. Something that's stressful to you may not faze someone else, or they may even enjoy it. For example, your morning commute may make you anxious and tense because you worry that traffic will make you late. Others, however, may find the trip relaxing because they allow more than enough time and enjoy listening to music while they drive.

Stress Related Illness

Science is constantly learning about the impact that stress has on your overall health. Stress is or may be a contributing factor in everything from backaches and insomnia to cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome (many people believe that CFS and fibromyalgia are the same illness).

Signs of Stress Overload

People who are experiencing stress overload may notice some of the following signs: anxiety or panic attacks, a feeling of being constantly pressured, hassled, and hurried, irritability and moodiness, physical symptoms, such as stomach problems, headaches, or even chest pain.

How Does Stress Affect You?

Stress can affect both your body and your mind. People under large amounts of stress can become tired, sick, and unable to concentrate or think clearly. Sometimes, they even suffer mental breakdowns.

Stress and the way we think

Particularly in normal working life, much of our stress is subtle and occurs without obvious threat to survival. Most comes from things like work overload, conflicting priorities, inconsistent values, over-challenging deadlines, conflict with co-workers, unpleasant environments and so on. Not only do these reduce our performance as we divert mental effort into handling them, they can also cause a great deal of unhappiness.

What are some things that don't help you deal with stress?

There are safe and unsafe ways to deal with stress. It's dangerous to try to escape your problems by using drugs and alcohol. Both can be very tempting, and your friends may offer them to you. Drugs and alcohol may seem like easy answers, but they're not. Using drugs and alcohol to deal with stress just adds new problems, such as addiction, or family and health problems.

Treatment

Perhaps the best general approach for treating stress can be found in the elegant passage by Reinhold Niebuhr, "Grant me the courage to change the things I can change, the serenity to accept the things I can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference." The process of learning to control stress is life-long, and will not only contribute to better health, but a greater ability to succeed in one's own agenda.