How You React To Stress?
Stress is an everyday fact of life. You can’t avoid it. Stress is any change that you must adapt to, ranging from the negative extreme of actual physical danger to the exhilaration of falling in love or achieving some long-desired success. In between, day-to-day living confronts even the most well-managed life with continuous stream of potentially stressful experiences. Not all stress is bad. In fact, stress is not only desirable but also essential to life. Whether the stress you experience is the result of major life changes or the cumulative effect of minor everyday hassles, it is how you respond to these experiences that determines the impact stress will have on your life.
Sources of Stress
You experience stress from four basic sources:
- Your environment bombards you with demands to adjust. You must endure weather, pollens, noise, traffic and pollution.
- You also must cope with social stressors such as deadlines, financial problems, job interviews, presentations, disagreements, demands for your time and attention, and loss of loved ones.
- A third source of stress is physiological. The rapid growth of adolescence, menopause in women, illness, aging, injuries, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, and inadequate sleep all tax the body. Your physiological reaction to environmental and social threats and changes can also result in stressful symptoms such as muscle tension, headaches, stomach upset and anxiety.
- The fourth source of stress is your thoughts. Your brain interprets complex changes in your environment and body and determines when to turn on the “emergency response”.
How you interpret and label your present experience and what you predict for the future can serve either to relax or to stress you. Interpreting a sour look from your boss to mean that you are doing an inadequate job is likely to be very anxiety provoking. Interpreting the same look as tiredness or preoccupation with personal problems will not be as frightening.
Stress researcher Richard Lazarus has argued that stress begins with your appraisal of a situation. You first ask how dangerous or difficult the situation is and what resources you have to help you cope with it. Anxious, stressed people often decide that (1) an event is dangerous, difficult, or painful and (2) they don’t have the resource to cope.
