Stress in our lives and stress management.

I have decided to write this in English for reasons related to the international dimentions of the modern problem called stress. In fact no one will disagree with the general notion that stress is in everyone (at least those people who are not hunters-gatherers, although stress is present in those peoples' lives too). I get stressed a lot and that motivated me to do what I am doing right now. My frieds also claim that they are dominated by stress. For some though, stress is not as bad as it is for other people. In fact stress helps them move on in their lives and face challenges in a more effective and practical way. It is true that stress affects people in many different ways.

So, what exactly is stress? We all can describe it through our experiences and the ways it affects our bodies and our mental state. But which would be the most appropriate definition of stress that applies for everyone? Hard to say simply because stress is intangible and it takes different forms. People of the medical world would say that "In medical terms, stress is the disruption of homeostasis through physical or psychological stimuli. Stressful stimuli can be mental, physiological, anatomical or physical[1] reactions. The term 'stress' in this context was coined by Austro-Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye, who defined the General Adaptation Syndrome or GAS paradigm in 1936." [Wikipedia's definition, 2007]
For many the above words mean nothing else but short breath, numbness, sudden change in mood, lonelyness and other things, basically defined as symptoms of stress.

The next logical question is how many types of stress can we find out there and how are they defined? According to Michael Blant, stress can be physical or mental. This categorization of stress is rather inadequate. However as Donovan and Kleiner suggest, stress can be easily categorized into 3 separate types according to its sources. 1)physical stress which can be brought by overwork, 2)mental stress which derives from our hopes, fears and regrets and; 3)situational stress which is the result of our interaction with the outside world and the roles that we hold in it. Physical stress although present in most peoples' lives can easily be eliminated by recreational activities even within the companies that employ the individuals. For instance many modern companies have gyms on their premices, which are proven to be beneficial to the physical stress of their workers. On the other hand, mental and situational stress are often mixed and treated as a stand alone type of stress. Nevertheless that is not the case and it can be portraited by a sound example: Many workers fear that they will be dismissed if they underperform and that causes them to stress, which respectively reduces their productivity. It is not situational stress though and it could be if those workers were earning too less for too long leading them to consider their family status. Of course, it is obvious that situational stress is many times related to mental stress and often both types of stress occur during the same period.

Not surprisingly humans are not the only animals on earth that feel stress. Scientific researches show that stress on primates takes exactly the same form as in humans, with hypertention signs, short breathing, drop of the limbs' temperature and sudden swifts of mood. Also, other mamals do get stressed when they feel threatened. Dolphins display similar reactions as humans during their stress periods. However, the human brain is much more developed than any other animal's brain and therefore there are significantly more stimuli that cause stress. At the dusk of human evolution, it is suggested that early hominids were experiencing the same type of stress as most animals excluding completely what we earlier described as situational stress. That would make complete sense if we consider what the early humans had to face every day. It would be too much energy consming to stress themselves over their position in the group or even their role in the world, when they had to face serious threats every day, which could easily cost their lives. It can be assumed that situational stress evolved along with human thinking. The invention of tools that made man's tasks easier, for example hunting, left humans with more free time as they had already acquired the basic things needed for survival as clothing, food, shelter. More free time meant also the beginning of arts and religion. It produced more complex human relationships and further interaction with other groups of humans, which in turn led to the expansion of knowledge and eventually to larger communities until aproximately 5,000 years ago we reached what we can now call the basic modern civilisations. Situational stress replaced large portions of physical stress.

In the next part we are going to discuss mainly how stress proves to be an advantage and disadvantage in our lives.