What Is Stress?
Stress is ‘the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them.’

Pressure is part and parcel of all work and helps to keep us motivated. But excessive pressure can lead to stress which undermines performance, is costly to employers and can make people ill. One of the founding fathers of stress research, Hans Selye, identified another part of this problem when he saw that different types of definition operate in different areas of knowledge. To a lawyer or linguist, words have very precise, definite and fixed meanings. In other fields, ideas and definitions continue evolving as research and knowledge expand.

Hans Selye’s view in 1956 was that “stress is not necessarily something 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.”

Selye believed that the biochemical effects of stress would be experienced irrespective or whether the situation was positive or negative.
Since then, ideas have moved on. In particular, the harmful biochemical and long-term effects of stress have rarely been observed in positive situations.

The Current Consensus
Now, the most commonly accepted definition of stress (mainly attributed to RS 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.

People feel little stress when they have the time, experience and resources to manage a situation. They feel great stress when they think they cannot handle the demands put upon them. Stress is therefore a negative experience. And it is not an inevitable consequence of an event: It depends a lot on people’s perceptions of a situation and their real ability to cope with it.

Stress and Your Health
We have seen the negative effect of exposure to long-term stress. These effects can also affect your health either through direct physiological damage to your body, or with harmful behavioral effects.

The behavioral effects of stress
The behavioral effects of an over-stressed lifestyle are easy to explain. 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 their health.
The direct physiological effects of excessive stress are more complex. In some areas they are well understood, while in other areas, they are still subject to debate and further research.

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 muscles; however, blood vessels in the heart may 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 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.
The direct effects of stress in other areas of health are still under debate. In some areas (for example in the formation of stomach ulcers) diseases traditionally associated with stress are now attributed to other causes.
Regular exercise can reduce your physiological reaction to stress. It also strengthens your heart and increases the blood supply to it, directly affecting your vulnerability to heart disease.

The Underlying mechanisms of Stress

The short-term response to stress (Fight-or-Flight):
Walter Cannon, in 1932 established the existence of the well-known ‘fight-or-flight response’. His work showed that when an animal experiences a shock or perceives a threat, it quickly releases hormones that help it to survive.

These 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 effect 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.

The long term effect of exposure to stress (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 and 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 situation does not have to be dramatic:
People experience this response when frustrated or interrupted, or when they experience a situation that is new or in some way challenging. This hormonal, fight-or-flight response is a normal part of everyday life and a part of everyday stress, although often with an intensity that is so low that we do not notice it.

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Copyright Liberian Observer -

Observer Doctor
By: Dr. Lily Sanvee