What is Stress?
It is hard to define exactly what is stress is as the word ‘stress’, like ‘success’, ‘failure’ or ‘happiness’, means different things to different people.
Is ‘stress’ really a synonym for distress? Or is it effort, fatigue, pain, fear, the need for concertation, the humiliation of censure or even an unexpected great success which requires complete reformation of one’s entire life? The answer to all these questions is a yes and no. that is what makes the definition so difficult. Every one of these conditions (and a thousand more) produce stress, but none can be singled out as being it, since the world applies equally to all the others.
The word itself comes from the Latin strictus, meaning ‘to draw tight’. The word stress then became absorbed to the old French word estrecier, meaning‘to straighten or narrow’. These meanings accurately describe what actually happens to your body when you experience excess stress. Your muscles and fasciae (connective tissues) tighten, you tend to hold your limbs and torso straighter and your blood vessel narrow. These are condition the characteristics of your fight and flight response, tge condition that enable primitive humans either to stand and confront danger or to flee.
During your lifetime, you will face a range of totally different problems, but medical research has shown that in many respects the body responds on the stereotyped manner outlined above, undergoing identical biochemical changes which are essentially designed to cope with any type of increased demand upon the human machinery. In other words, although stress-producing factors (technically called stressor0 are different, they all elicit essentially the same biological stress response.
Short-term arousal due to stress can be lifesaving, but long-term arousal can be damaging to health as the body strength is continually drained at a higher rate than normal and no time to recoup energy given. Long term depression and feelings of being unable to cope, which may result from prolonged stress, produce slight different changes and it is thought that they may have even greater potential to be damaged.
The distinction between stressor and stress perhaps the first important step in the scientific analysis of this most common biological phenomenon that we all know only too well from personal experience. Dr. Hans Selye, an internationally acknowledged authority on understanding stress, defines stress as a ‘nonspecific response of the body to any demand made on it’.
Each demand made upon your body is, in a sense, unique- that is specific. When cold, you shiver to produce more heat and the blood vessels in your skin contract to hold in the heat. When hot, you sweat because the evaporation of perspiration has a cooling effect. Similarly, any drug or hormone you take have their own specific effects on your system.
No matter what kind of derangements is produced, all these stressors have one thing in common: they increase the demand for readjustment. Therefore, although the cause and consequence reaction may specific, the demand itself is non-specific, requiring adaptation to a problem, irrespective of what that problem may be. The non-specific demand for activity is the essence of stress .
Studies show that many illnesses have no specific cause but the result of a constellation of factors among which non-specific stress often plays a decisive role. We have to consider that such ailments as peptic ulcers, high blood pressure, nervous breakdown, and so on may not be primarily due to such causes as diet, genetics or occupational hazards. They may be simply be the products of the ongoing non-specific stress that results from attempted to endure more than we can.
Thus instead of undergoing complicated drug therapies or surgical operations, we can often help ourselves better by establishing wheatear or not the decisive cause of our illness is stress, which may stem from our relationship with a member of our family or our employer, or it may merely be due to our over-emphasis on being right every time.
