Stress is a normal physical response to events that make you feel threatened or upset your balance in some way. In other words, stress is a demand made upon the adaptive capacities of the mind and body. It is a demand upon the body’s capacity. When your capacity for handling stress is strong and healthy, the outcome is positive. When you lack the ability to handle the demands, the outcome is negative.
The stress response is the body’s way of protecting you. Harvard physicians Robert Yerkes and John Dodson first described the relationship between stress and performance in 1908. The Yerkes-Dodson Principle implies that to a certain point, a specific amount of stress is healthy, useful, and even beneficial. When you are working, it helps you stay focused, energetic, and alert. In emergency situations, stress can save your life. I think stress helps us rise to meet challenges. Anxiety assumes an extremely imperative part on building fixation power. For example, it can keep you on your toes throughout a presentation at work, or drives you to study for an exam than sitting in front of the TV. Anyhow past a certain point, stress quits being useful and begins bringing on real harm to one's health, productivity, relationships, and quality of life. The signs and indications of stress over-burden might be practically anything. Stress influences the brain, body, and conduct from numerous points of view, and everybody encounters push diversely. Overwhelming stress does not only lead to serious mental and physical health problems, but it also can take a toll on your relationships in your social life. Our modern life has become too complicated because of daily hassles, deadlines, frustrations, and too many demands to fulfill. Now days, almost everybody has their own stress. Poor people have their own stress of basic needs such as food and shelter. Middle class people want to become successful and become rich one day, and rich people have their own stress to become even richer. There are mainly six types of stressor. They are physical, work, psychological, family, social, and environmental. Physical stressors include sleep debt, poor diet, drug-alcohol misuse, excess caffeine, smoking, surgery, and chronic pain. There is a lot of work related stress such as being unhappy with your boss, having a heavy workload or too much responsibility, working long hours, and working under dangerous conditions. I was facing discrimination or harassment at work, low pay, job insecurity, poor support or supervision, and workaholic. Psychological stressors consists of excess anger, unrealistic beliefs and expectation, unemployment, financial problems, perfectionism, loneliness, low self esteem, negative self talk, excessive self, criticism, and low levels of assertion. Social stressor includes fear of crime, living in an urban area, poverty, low social support, problem neighbors, and racial harassment. Environmental stressors can be pollution, excess noise, poor housing, and traffic jams. Life stresses can result a big impact. Some of the examples of life stresses are the death of a loved one, divorce, loss of a job, increase in financial obligations. Stress usually happens by getting married, moving, chronic illness or injury, and other traumatic event, like natural disaster, theft, rape, or violence against you or a loved one and moving from one part of the world to another. I was born in a country called Nepal. Life was simpler there; the only stress was to get good grades at school. I came to United States at the age of 19. I had to earn money to cover all my bills, pay tuition for school, and maintain my grades. Life here is altogether different than my home country. My stress level became very high. I used to get stressed quickly because of cultural difference. I had hard time adjusting the life style here in U.S. It was hard for me to find friends and to become familiar with current events. Everything was new to me here because Nepal is a small underdeveloped country. Life is busier here as compared to Nepal. I used to get stressed in loneliness. I used to misplacing keys when in hurry. To get rid of stressor, I used to read daily newspaper, magazines to maintain of the latest news and popular trends to move along U.S culture. I used to work at some convenient store in New York. I was not happy with that job because of the office politics and there was no job security. Also my last job at T-Mobile store, I had to work so many hours because my pay rate was very low. I had to increase my weekly hour’s increase in order to cover my expenses including school tuition. I haven’t had time for my social life because I used to work most of the times. I used to feel lonely, estranged, and isolated. According to the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social support has been inadequately conceptualized and operationalized; therefore, the specific dimensions of support that reduce event impacts cannot be identified. The direct effect of events upon support and the interactive (buffering) effect of events with support have been confounded in many studies, such that results may have been biased in favor of the hypothesis. The relationships between events, support, and psychological disturbance have not been clarified theoretically; thus, the possibility that support itself is an etiological factor has been overlooked. This article reviews empirical work on the buffering hypothesis, outlines alternate conceptualizations and operationalization of support, presents a refined hypothesis and model for analysis, and suggests three theoretical approaches that may be used to explain the interrelationships between support, events, and disturbance. This article helped me to control stress on social level. It encouraged me to make friends with people who share similar interests and who understand you for who you are. It helped me to take pride in my ability to tolerate isolation, alienation, and social conflict.
You may feel like the stress in your life is out of your control, but you can constantly manipulate the way you react. Taking care of stress is about assuming responsibility: assuming responsibility of your opinions, your feelings, your motivation, your surroundings, and the way you manage issues. Stress management includes changing the distressing circumstance when you can, changing your reaction when you can't, dealing with yourself, and find few minutes for rest and repose. There are many ways to manage and cope to reduce stress. More or less of them can contribute to positive side of animation, but some can drag you to wrong way which can damage in the long run such as habits of smoking, drinking, taking pills or drugs to relax, taking out stress on others by fighting.
I realize that maintaining balance in life is very important. I then tried to make time for fun, rest, and relaxation. It is important to make time for family fun. Set aside regular family fun time where you can enjoy each other's company, let off steam, and forget about work related stress that helped me a lot and also my family to stay positive.
Recently, I have started writing stress journal. I think stress journal helped me to identify the regular stressors in my life and the way to deal with them. Each time you feel stressed, keep track of it in your journal. It helps to track down the level of stress. I listen to the music to calm my stress. I try to avoid stressor and try to move forward with positive thoughts. Few months ago, I used to drink a lot, eat all kinds of junk food and drink coffee all day long to try to focus on work. Now days, I start my day with healthy breakfast. I have reduced amount of caffeine and sugar intake. It wasn’t that hard for me to quit smoking. I usually go workout everyday after work because aerobic exercise helps to release stress and tension also helped me to maintain my physical fitness. Sometimes I use relaxation techniques such as yoga, meditation, and deep breathing because it activates the body’s relaxation response.
If someone consistently causes stress in your life, the best way to solve the trouble would be to determine the sum of time you spend with that person or end the relationship alone. The best way to reduce stress quickly and reliably is by using your senses what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch or through movement. By viewing a favorite photo, smelling a specific scent, listening to a favorite piece of music, or hugging, helps a lot to reduce the level of stress. My favorite thing to do when I’m stressed is to watch myself in the mirror and make funny faces, try to think of the funniest movement from the past, listen to the music or watch movies, talk to the favorite person, etc. Accept the things you can’t change. There will always be stressors in life that you can’t do anything about. Learn to accept the inevitable rather than rail against a situation and making it even more stressful.