Cause of Stress
We all react differently to different potential stressors. One person’s mild stimulation from life is another person’s intolerable burden. What is severely stressful for one person may no more than a tiresome niggling incident to another. The degree of stress you experience is determined not simply by eternal events but by how you perceive and respond to it.
The way which you perceive the event and respond to a potential stressor is called ‘stress motivator’. There are four identifiable categories of stress motivation: cognitive, emotional, psychodynamic and situational
Cognitive Stress
A natural phenomenon of the human brain is the constant chattering (talking to ourselves) that goes on inside our head. However, few people are aware that what we say to ourselves has a strong bearing on our mental well being.
If you tell yourself a particular situation is helpless, or that there are no way out, it will be more than likely to end up that way. Also, worrying something will not work out as you would like causes anxiety and even harmful distress.
Like destructive, but still unsatisfactory is a much used half heated attempt: “I will try to do my best”. The correct self talk is “I will do the best I can:. A positive, self-assertive statement is more likely to get the job done, and thereby help you to avoid a lot of unnecessary stress.
Emotional Stress
Frustration is another common phenomenon we face in our daily lives. The resultant emotional stress can result to maladaptive behaviors which make us even more ineffective to handle the cause of the frustration.
When faced with a frustration and a stressful situation we may repeat negative behaviors because they familiar. Another response includes anger and irritation not a relaxing response and one which probably will not calm an already tense situation. Both these responses simply compound the initial stress.
Psychodynamic conflict
When you are under stress you are quite likely to do over and over again the things that got you into trouble in the first place. This unconscious preoccupation with past events can keep you in the same stressful situation, and even aggravate it further and thus intensify the stress.
When your proper perception of a situation is blocked by stress, you may not see that you need to respond to the problem differently than you need to respond to the problem differently than you have in past. Instead, you reply past responses, becoming frustrated and further stressed when these methods don’t prove effective.
Situational Stress
This is imposed upon us by the physical environment and takes many forms: crowding, sudden or repetitive noise , cold, heat and s on
Life’s stressful events
Various event in everyone’s lives commonly cause stress. The following lists includes some of the most stressful events.
- · Death of a spouse or partner
- · Divorce
- · Separation from spouse or partner
- · Death of a close family member
- · Personal injury or illness
- · Marriage
- · Fired form employment
- · Marital reconciliation
- Retirement
