HEALTHY CHANGES:
4 Steps Towards Overall Health
Step 1:
Understanding Your "Total Health"
Step 2:
Make the Commitment
Step 3:
Assessment & Goals
Step 4:
ACTION TOOL RESOURCE CENTER
Mental/Emotional
Health
Social
Health
Spiritual
Health
Physical
Health
Step 4: RESOURCE TOOL CENTER
Mental/Emotional Health
"What I fear most about stress is not that it kills, but that it prevents one from savoring life." Jean-Louis Seven-Schreiber
STRESS
The most commonly accepted definition of stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.
If we have the time, experience and resources to manage a situation we don’t feel stress, but when we feel we are lacking in any one area, we stress. So stress is considered to be a negative experience. But it is not an inevitable consequence of an event: It depends a lot on our perception of a situation and our real ability to cope with it.
What happens during stress is that the brain is alerted to the fact that there’s some need for the body to respond. It activates neural centers in the brain to initiate a variety of reactions, many of them chemical, and they tell the body to do things that people need to do when they need to react. Triggered by the brain, chemicals like adrenaline surge through the body during a stress reaction, causing heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar to rise in order to get more oxygen and energy more quickly to our muscles. These chemicals also improve alertness, and some research has found that learning and memory are enhanced during a stressful experience.
There are two types of instinctive stress response that are important to how we understand stress and stress management: the short-term “Fight-or-Flight” response and the long-term “General Adaptation Syndrome”. The first is a basic survival instinct, while the second is a long-term effect of exposure to stress.
A third mechanism comes from the way that we think and interpret the situations in which we find ourselves.
Read More:
Responding
to Stress: Discovery.com
What
is Stress?: Discovery.com
Stress:
A Definition
- Discovery.com
The Three Ps of Stress
Physical Stress
Most
of us have experienced this stress sometime or the other in life. This can
range from having to cope with a huge physical workload to having to respond
to an extra workload, just when you hit the very bottom of energy levels,
and just do not have it left in you to take anymore. This stress is often
a simpler form that can be corrected through a short period of rest!
Physiological Stress
Sickness
puts the biggest stress on a human body. All systems in the body may not
be in sync to perform at your peak. Illness can put a stress on any one
or more, in some cases all the systems in the body. Ask a person who is
undergoing cancer chemotherapy what acute physiological stress can be! Worst,
the physiological stress often manifests as physical as well as psychological
stress complicating the matters further.
Psychological Stress
The
sheer act of having to go through something can put a pressure on the mind,
which can lead to problems both in the mind and the body. The psychological
stress may be as simple as having to appear for an examination or trying
to look your best when you are trying to meet with your lover or an impending
divorce or a loss of fortune that can leave one an emotional wreck.
Read More:
What
Stress Is: MindTools.com
INSPIRATION CORNER
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