Stress and Health

Stress and Your Health

What is Stress?- It is a normal and unavoidable part of life.- It provides the challenge we need to improve physically,

mentally, and emotionally.- Hans Selye (one of the founding fathers of stress

research) described stress as something that is not necessarily bad - it all depends on how you take it. The stress of exhilarating, creative successful work is beneficial, while that of failure, humiliation or infection is detrimental.

- Now, the most commonly accepted definition of stress (mainly attributed to Richard S Lazarus) is that 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.

Types of Instinctive Stress Response

• 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

- the long-term “General Adaptation Syndrome”

Fight-or-Flight

• Proposed by Walter Bradford Cannon, it is the instinctive physiological response to a threatening situation, which readies one either to resist forcibly or to run away.

• When in Fight-or-Flight response, Our hormones help us to run faster and fight harder. They increase heart rate and blood pressure, delivering more oxygen and blood sugar to power important muscles. They increase sweating in an effort to cool these muscles, and help them stay efficient. They divert blood away from the skin to the core of our bodies, reducing blood loss if we are damaged. And as well as this, these hormones focus our attention on the threat, to the exclusion of everything else. All of this significantly improves our ability to survive life-threatening events.

Power, but little control...• Unfortunately, this mobilization of the body for survival also

has negative consequences. In this state, we are excitable, anxious, jumpy and irritable. This reduces our ability to work effectively with other people.

• With trembling and a pounding heart, we can find it difficult to execute precise, controlled skills. And the intensity of our focus on survival interferes with our ability to make fine judgments based on drawing information from many sources. We find ourselves more accident-prone and less able to make good decisions.

• It is easy to think that this fight-or-flight, or adrenaline, response is only triggered by obviously life-threatening danger. On the contrary, recent research shows that we experience the fight-or-flight response when simply encountering something unexpected.

The General Adaptation Syndrome

• Hans Selye took a different approach from Cannon. Starting with the observation that different diseases and injuries to the body seemed to cause the same symptoms in patients, he identified a general response (the “General Adaptation Syndrome”) with which the body reacts to a major stimulus. While the Fight-or-Flight response works in the very short term, the General Adaptation Syndrome operates in response to longer-term exposure to causes of stress.

• Selye identified that when pushed to extremes, animals reacted in three stages:

- First, in the Alarm Phase, they reacted to the stressor.

- Next, in the Resistance Phase, the resistance to the stressor increased as the animal adapted to, and coped with, it. This phase lasted for as long as the animal could support this heightened resistance.

- Finally, once resistance was exhausted, the animal entered the Exhaustion Phase, and resistance declined substantially.

What is a Stressor?

- It is any event, experience, or environmental stimulus that causes stress in an individual.

- These are factors in life that produce stress.- These events or experiences are perceived as

threats or challenges to the individual and can be either physical or psychological.

- It is the source of stress.- Stressors are more likely to affect an individual's

health when they are "chronic, highly disruptive, or perceived as uncontrollable”

Types of Stressors

An event that triggers the stress response may include:

• Physical Stressors • Social Stressors• Occupational Stressors• Your Personality• Biological Changes• Your Behavior and Life-style

Physical Stressors

• These include elements of interior design such as color, space, and lightning.

• These also include the noise that we hear from our environment.

Social Stressors

• Social stressors are stressors from one’s relationships with others and from the social environment in general.

Occupational Stressors

• These are stressors involving work.• Occupational stress arise when people

are presented with work demands and pressures that are not matched to their knowledge and abilities and which challenge their ability to cope.

Your Personality•Our personalities shape how we view a situation and how we react to it.• It is largely determined by what we have experienced and learned in the past.• If someone experienced failure in a certain situation in the past, he might experience stress when facing a similar situation.

Biological Changes• Some normal biological changes that occur during life are also sources of stress.• The teen years are a time of a transition from childhood to adulthood. During these years, your body undergoes rapid and dramatic changes. There is a profound increase in the production of hormones, which can affect your mood and emotions.• Because these normal biological changes are taking place, adolescence is often an emotional and stressful period of life.•Hormonal levels also change during the female hormonal cycle. For example, hormone levels change during the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and childbirth. These hormonal changes can physically and emotionally stressful.

Your Behavior and Life-style

• In many ways, personal behavior and life-style can become sources of physical and emotional stress.• Failing to plan your time properly can create needless problems.• Likewise, lack of regular exercise or sleep puts extra strain on your body. When you skip or eat meals irregularly, your energy cycle is constantly interrupted. Because of these, our body will not function at its best.

Social Readjustments Rating Scale

• The effects of life change have been carefully analyzed by Thomas Homes and Richard Rahe (1967), who developed a scale to measure the impact of 43 major life events, called the Social Readjustments Rating Scale.

Adults

Non-adults Score of 300+:

At risk of illness.Score of 150-299: Risk of illness is moderate (reduced by 30% from the above risk).Score <150: Only have a slight risk of illness.

How Stress Affects Your Health

What is Psychosomatic Illness?

• A mental disorder that causes somatic symptoms.

• A physical disease that is thought to be caused, or made worse, by mental factor.

• A defect in a body organ is called an organic disease. But when an organ has no defect in its structure, but acts up due to emotional stress, the condition is called a psychosomatic disease or disorder.

Behavioral Effects of Stress

• When under pressure, some people are more likely to drink heavily or smoke, as a way of getting immediate chemical relief from stress. Others may have so much work to do that they do not exercise or eat properly. They may cut down on sleep, or may worry so much that they sleep badly. They may get so carried away with work and meeting daily pressures that they do not take time to see the doctor or dentist when they need to. All of these are likely to harm health.

Stress and Heart disease

• The link between stress and heart disease is well-established. If stress is intense, and stress hormones are not ‘used up’ by physical activity, our raised heart rate and high blood pressure put tension on arteries and cause damage to them. As the body heals this damage, artery walls scar and thicken, which can reduce the supply of blood and oxygen to the heart.

• This is where a fight-or-flight response can become lethal: Stress hormones accelerate the heart to increase the blood supply to muscles; however, blood vessels in the heart may have become so narrow that not enough blood reaches the heart to meet these demands. This can cause a heart attack.

Other effects of stress

• Stress has been also been found to damage the immune system, which explains why we catch more colds when we are stressed. It may intensify symptoms in diseases that have an autoimmune component, such as rheumatoid arthritis. It also seems to affect headaches and irritable bowel syndrome, and there are now suggestions of links between stress and cancer.

•  Stress is also associated with mental health problems and, in particular, anxiety and depression. Here the relationship is fairly clear: the negative thinking that is associated with stress also contributes to these.

Stress and Your Performance

The Positive Effects of Pressure

• Sometimes, however, the pressures and demands that may cause stress can be positive in their effect. One example of this is where sportsmen and women flood their bodies with fight-or-flight adrenaline to power an explosive performance. Another example is where deadlines are used to motivate people who seem bored or unmotivated.

And the Negative...

• In most work situations jobs, our stress responses causes our performance to suffer. A calm, rational, controlled and sensitive approach is usually called for in dealing with most difficult problems at work: Our social inter-relationships are just too complex not to be damaged by an aggressive approach, while a passive and withdrawn response to stress means that we can fail to assert our rights when we should.

Managing Stress: Skills and Strategies

• You can reduce stress in your life by learning to manage your time properly. This requires planning activities before you begin them. Allow enough time to carry out activities. So you can avoid a last-minute rush. When you have many things to do at once, set priorities. Decide which tasks or activities are most important and tackle those activities first.

1. Behavior Strategies

•Second, plan a stress-reducing life-style. Try to look ahead and anticipate major changes in life and plan for them. When possible, limit the number of changes you make in your life at any one time. Balance work and play. Make daily relaxation a priority. Then, plan relaxation time each day no matter how busy you may be. Practice positive life-style habit. Get regular exercise, establish regular meal times, and do not skip meals. Avoid the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs.• Finally, adopt a positive attitude. Learn to change the things you can but accept the things you cannot change.

• You have a social support system made up of your family members, friends and others you can talk to. Researchers have found that people with a good social support system enjoy better health and live longer than those people who have few personal ties. Scientists believe that social support provides a personal buffer against the harmful effects of stress.• It is important to use your support system regularly and share your experiences, good and bad, with those whom you can talk to and trust.

2. Your Social Support System

3. Relaxation Skills

• Relaxed Breathing. Stress alters natural breathing patterns. In stressful situations, only the chest muscles are used to breathe, and breathing becomes shallow and rapid. For those who repeatedly experience stress, shallow chest breathing can become a poor but regular breathing habit. Most teenagers and adults unconsciously breathe this way. Learning how to breathe properly can help you relax and stop the stress response when it begins.

Inhale slowly and deeply with your mouth closed. Expand your stomach so that your lungs can fill completely with air. Imagine you are trying to bring the air all the way down to your stomach. Your stomach should rise and your chest should hardly move at all. Then slowly exhale through the mouth making an “aaah” sound. Your stomach muscles should contract as you empty your lungs completely. Practice this exercise for 5 to 10 minutes at a time until you can breathe this way without concentration. Try using this exercise to calm yourself whenever stress begins to make you feel anxious. You will be surprised to see how this simple skill can make you feel better.• Progressive Relaxation. It is a simple method that reduces body tension from head to toe. First, sit or lie down in a comfortable position and use relaxed breathing. As you slowly inhale, tightly tense the muscles in one part of your body. As you slowly exhale, completely relax the tensed muscles so they feel limp. Tense and relax the muscles in each part of your body, progressing from head to toe or from toe to head.

The End..