What is Stress, Anyway?
What is Stress, Anyway?
There are different kinds of stress and recognizing which ones are beneficial and which ones are not can be useful. Throughout the workforce, an increasing number of people are feeling more stress in their lives. As we work to keep up with the pace of society and the levels of information and communication weíre forced to endure, we experience added stress. How can we keep this stress from getting worse?
Before you can keep something in its place, you have to understand the nature of the beast! Dr. Hans Selye, one of the prominent psychologists of the twentieth century, undertook original and breakthrough work in the area of understanding and defining stress.
"Stress," according to Dr. Selye, is the "single, non-specific reaction of the body to a demand made upon it."
What did he mean by a non-specific reaction by the body? When there's some situation, irritation, or force confronting you, your body will respond in some way. This response is far different, however, than your body's response will be if you step on a thumbtack in your bare feet, walk into a freezing meat locker, or get slapped upside the head.
What's the difference? For the latter three events, your body's reaction will be quite specific. You'll feel the pain of the thumbtack, the freeze of the meat locker, or the wham of the slap in a specific location at a specific time. The pain or discomfort, you may be assured, will be quite specific.
More nebulous, non-specific stimuli can cause a form of pain as well. This pain however, comes in the form of stress. You don't always recognize it, yet the price it exacts upon our bodies can be significant.
When you think about it, a specific reaction to a pain-inducing event, while not desirable, is something you get over (most of the time). A non-specific reaction to a non-specific type of irritant such as the droning noise from the equipment in the next office, or the lingering mental effects of knowing that the bank may foreclose on your property at any time, can actually do more long-run damage than an acute pain from a specific source.
How Stress Manifests Itself in Different Ways
Consider stress as the wear-and-tear on your body. Dr. Marilyn Manning, a west coast author and trainer says that stress is a "by-product of pressures, changes, demands, and challenges that face us on a daily basis." Nevertheless, the changes, pressures, and challenges that you confront on a daily basis don't necessarily need to be bad, nor cause stress.
The all too familiar tension that accompanies what you know as stress, is largely self-induced. It's a way of your body telling you that you need to be more attuned to your environment and, as Dr. Manning says, "To become more attentive and permissive, to let go, and to relax.
Signs of Stress
What are some of the signs that you're experiencing stress? Your saliva is less abundant, leaving your mouth and throat dry. You may experience jaw pain or pressure, indicating that you are clenching your teeth or holding your jaw tightly. You may literally deprive yourself of oxygen by engaging in short, shallow breathing. You're literally depriving yourself of oxygen. Your body has no choice at this point, but to request that you yawn, forcing you to take deeper breaths. On the contrary, you may also be likely to swallow more air which can result in bloating or belching.
Stress can make you more prone to colds and flus, headaches of all kinds, and even gas and heartburn. Stress can constrict the blood vessels in your arms and legs while increasing your heart rate, a situation that results in an increase in your blood pressure, perhaps to dangerously high levels. You may not have realized that, under stress, you may actually experience fat within your body being deposited in your midsection.
Sources of Stress
Good stress and bad stress?--Traveling along your life's highway, you've heard that there's good stress and bad stress. Not surprisingly, the term stress is often misunderstood and misused. Even high paid executives often have misperceptions regarding it, some don't even believe it exists. What is good stress all about?
Think of it this way--good stress is what gets you up and running, what enables you to get to work, get to the ball game on time, or clean out the garage on Saturday. Good stress helps to make your life enjoyable, even interesting. Such stress provides stimulation, challenges, and is essential to development, growth, and change.
Bad stress is the kind that makes you anxious and irritable, dampens your spirits, and shortens your life. Bad stress is a reaction by you to some type of pressure which can be both external and self-imposed which prompts psychological and real physiological changes within you of an undesirable nature.
Dr. Selye once said that, "the only person without stress is a dead person." There is no single event that categorically leads to stress. Dr. Selye says, "It's not the event but your perception of it that makes all the difference." Two people can be subjected to the same stimuli, one not notice it at all, and the other become stressed out to the max.
If you wake in the morning because some bird is in the tree making an announcement to the entire flock, and you've never liked the chirping of birds, let alone when they do it early in the morning before you were ready to get up, you may find such chirping stressful. Meanwhile, your spouse is in zzzz-land, because he or she grew up in the country, where there were hundreds of birds, and it was quite a natural thing for your spouse to hear them all day long. Conversely something that drives your spouse nuts, may have no effect on you at all. What a world, and what a phenomenon.
What Means What -- Some Terminology Related to Stress
Among the best definitions of stress that I've come across is the following: stress is the psychological and physiological reaction that takes place when you perceive an imbalance in the level of demand placed on you, and your capacity to meet that demand. In plain English, you're up against something and you're either not quite sure if you have what it takes to meet the challenge or, it is so easy that you want to be somewhere else.
In many ways, managing stress is synonymous with keeping the pressures you face at a challenging, but containable level. Such a level is what you might term good stress. When you face a challenge, one that you perceive to be within your capabilities, you're able to flourish and, more often than not, meet the challenge. Unfortunately, maintaining such a level is more easily discussed than achieved. If the pressures you face become excessive, whether real or imagined, you're likely to become "distressed" or, for shorthand, stressed. Note: in the remainder of this article, "stress" will refer to bad stress.
Curiously, if you don't have enough of a challenge confronting you, you're also likely to become stressed. Think about the situation where you were given a job that was way too easy for you. Did you run up and down the halls yelling yippee? Maybe for a couple of minutes you did, but invariably boredom and fatigue set in. You get a backache, a stiff shoulder, a neck pain doing things that don't stimulate and challenge you. Thus, there's always a fine balance to be achieved.
Stress by itself is simply not something out there waiting to get you. You have to perceive it, recognize it, and, based on your background or upbringing, have it rub up against you the wrong way.
A Brief Lexicon of Stress-Related Terminology
- The stress response -- When you experience the consequences of exposure to undo stress strain such that you suffer some adverse impact.
- Mismanaged stress -- Now adaptive ways of coping with stress, such as relying on drugs or alcohol.
- Stressors -- Sources of stress. In the work environment these may include lighting, noise, ventilation, extremes in temperature, proximity to others, and hazards among many other factors.
- Burnout -- An umbrella term used to describe a particular type of stress, manifested by diminished personal accomplishment, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. Some researchers contend that burnout is a specific type of stress that refers specifically to the situation wherein you face taxing working conditions and are responsible for high levels of interpersonal contact. For example, someone in a customer service department who hears customer complaints all day long is a reasonable candidate for burnout (More on burnout later, stay tuned).
- C. Leslie Charles, a trainer and author based in East Lansing, Michigan, categorizes stress into four basic areas:
- Anticipatory stress is stress of the future. Another word for it is worry: You concern yourself with endless stressful possibilities, worrying and stewing over something that hasn't happened, and may not happen. A better strategy? Plan. Planning is different than worrying. If you're concerned about a pending event, figure out how you would handle it and quit worrying. If it happens, you're ready for it; if not, even better!
- Situational stress is stress of the moment. It's an immediate threat, challenge, or agitation, demanding your attention right now. How to deal with it? Breathe! Take a nice deep breath from your diaphragm (not your chest) and let it relax you. Keep your hands open (avoid making fists) and relax your shoulders. Tell yourself you can handle this (because you can). Stay as calm as possible, do your best, and give yourself credit for coping when it's over.
- Chronic stress is stress over time. It may stem from a tough experience over which you have no control except to endure or accept, such as the loss of a loved one, an illness, accident, or other trauma. It could be from a strained personal relationship or unfortunate work situation. Chronic stress is best handled one day at a time with patience, personal strength, support from others, a daily plan, and few projections into the future.
- Residual stress is stress of the past. It represents our inability or unwillingness to let go of old hurts or bad memories. Come to terms with the fact that you cannot rewrite history, change the past, or magically make things recur the way you want. Let them go. Charles emphasizes that you can relieve stress significantly by reducing your anticipatory and residual stress and handling the other two as they occur.
By simply recognizing these different faces of stress, you'll be able to proceed accordingly. For example, if you're experiencing stress, and can get yourself to an awareness level where you recognize that it's situational stress, i.e. something that will pass rather quickly, you'll immediately be able to "turn down" your stress level internally because you know that it's not something you're going to be concerned with two hours or two days from now.
