Abstract

In recent years, the living condition is getting better than the past; people have better education life, better civilized living and better social life. As technology and the form of mass media has been changing so fast, people can have information easily through internet and chat with their friends and so on. Also, people are enjoying their life with exciting hobbies. Even though, life is more comfortable and better than before, more people have lots of stress. When they wake up, they start the morning with their job or school, fight with their projects and spend the whole day working. This routine is performed every day, which causes too much stress, which causes sleeplessness, heart disease, depression and even death. However, there are the ways that people can minimize stress and manage the stress that is inevitable. Positive thinking is then used to create positive assertions that people can use to counter negative thoughts. These confirmations compensate for negative thoughts and build their self-confidence.

Stress

In recent years, the living condition is getting better than the past; people have better education life, better civilized living and better social life. However, people are not always happy with those conveniences, especially at the work place. People are having unpleasant events more than the past, such as losing a job, arguing with co-workers or managers at the work place, and trouble with friends or teachers at school and having difficulties at home. Those feelings like there are too many pressures and demands on them. Losing their desire and sleep worrying about tests, projects and schoolwork make them have lots of stress. Then what is stress? According to EhealthMD (2004), stress is the emotional and physical strain cause by people’s response to pressure from the outside world. Usually, common stress reactions include irritability, tension, inability to concentrate and a variety of physical symptoms that include headache and a fast heartbeat (EhealthMD, 2004).

There are more causes that people have got stress. The potential causes of stress are highly individual and numerous.

Stress is a usual part of life and stress affects people of all ages, all races and all walks of life. However, if left unmanaged and disregarded, stress has many different causes which lead to psychological, emotional, and even physical problems, including high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, diabetes, and sleepiness. A lot of scholars have studies based on this issue and they found the causes and effects of stress.

First of all, stress can bring about psychological problems. Is it possible that stress gets inside the body to affect the immune response? The American Psychological Association (1994) mentioned that sympathetic fibers descend from the brain into both primary (thymus and bone marrow) and secondary (lymph nodes and spleen) lymphoid tissues. These substances bind to specific receptors on white blood cells and have diverse regulatory effects on their distribution and function (Ader, Felten, & Cohen, 2001). These sometimes lead people to engage in behaviors – such as alcohol use or changes in sleeping patterns – that also could modify immune system processes. Thus, behavior represents a potentially important pathway linking stress with the immune system (Felten & Felten, 1994).

Most causes of psychological stress are perpetually related to psychological and emotional disorders. Stressful situations can set forward a series of emotional symptoms such as anxiety attacks, phobias, a personality disintegration, exaggerationed emotional responses and psychological discomposure such as confusion, depression, burn out and vehicular accidents. These disconcertments in psychological and emotional health may exacerbate or cause debilitating disorders, which can put an end to life on its track (Spiritual and Psychological Stress, 2000).

Second, stress leads to emotional problems which are very difficult to cope with and manage. According to the dealing with Stress, People’s bodies can not defend themselves against the damage that emotional stress produces quietly over time. People’s bodies pay a heavy physiological price for every single moment that they feel tense, angry, anxious, and frustrated. Emotional stress is often precipitated by a dramatic event that puts a person’s nervous system under acute strain. This could be an event such as seeing someone die, losing a loved one, or being put into a life-threatening situation. An event such as these can put serious strain on a person’s mind and nerves and the unbelievable strain can cause changes in the way that the brain works. Actually, a severe emotional strain could even cause somebody to be afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder. However, emotional stress does not result in a sudden shock. It can also follow a total emotional strain that mounts to an overwhelming strain that blocks a person from thinking about anything other than the problems that seem to have no solution. Next, as the stress mounts, the mind and brain are left in their own cocoon of stress that can only want attention to itself, cutting the person off from the world outside. Therefore, emotional stress can result in inability to concentrate, memory problems, detachment, and fatigue (Dumbleton, 2008).

Experiencing psychological and emotional stress leads to an increase in heart rate, release of stress hormone and elevation of blood pressure. All these end in a greater workload for the heart, which can be risky. Psychological and emotional stress brings out physical problems.

According to the

Journal of the American Medical Association

, effects of stress on the heart are increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, release of stress hormones, including epinephrine, which is also known as adrenaline from the adrenal glands, increased oxygen demand on the body and temporarily higher metabolic rate, lower threshold, unusual heart rhythms, including ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, and atrial fibrillation. Electrical unreliability in the heart makes it easier for these abnormal heart beats to occur. Also, stress gives rise to spasm of heart blood vessels, leading to inadequate blood flow to the heart (Torpy, 2007).

The lack of time makes people buy a lot of instant food and time saving products for to save time. Instant food includes a high amount of sodium has a bad effect on health, which could cause diabetes. According to the Diabetes Care(2002), Stress having an effect on mental and physical health causes people’s blood sugar level to rise. Stress hormones like epinephrine and cortisol start flowing since one of their most important roles is to raise blood sugar to help boost energy when it’s needed most; these act the like fight-or-flight response. People can not fight danger when their blood sugar is getting low, as it can rise to help to meet the challenge (Rouge & Sledge, 2002).

Not only human feels stress, but also warm-blooded animals feel pain and the emotion of fear and stress. (add more)

The factors of stress are a general outlook on life, social support system, and problem-solving abilities. People might think of stressors, which are the pressures and demands that cause stress as being negative experiences. However, the demands and pressures that may cause stress can be positive in their effect.

Graph 1.

(need sources)

According to the Stress Management from Mind Tools (n.d.), the relationship between pressure and performance is described in one of the oldest and most important ideas in stress management. The inverted-U relationship pays attention to people’s performance of a task. The left hand side of the graph is easy to give an explanation of pragmatic reasons. When there is a bit of pressure on people to carry out an important task, there is little inducement for people to focus energy and attention on it. This is specially the case when there may be other, more interesting, more urgent, tasks competing for attention. As pressure on people increases, they enter the “area of best performance”. People are able to focus and perform a task well. There is enough pressure on people to concentrate their attention but not so much that it disturbs their performance (Stress Management from Mind Tools, n.d.).

The right hand side of the graph is high stress anxiety and unhappiness. As written above, this situation is that people become uncomfortably stressed, distracted, anxious, have difficulties, and negative thinking begins to enter their minds. At this point, people have to look at causes of stress and

References

What is Stress? (2004).

EhealthMD.

Retrieved April 15, 2008, from http://www.ehealthmd.com/library/stress/STR_whatis.html

Rouge, B., & Sledge, D. (2002). Stress and Diabetes.

Diabetes Care

, 25, 30-34.

Felten, S. Y., & Felten, D. (1994). Neural-immune interaction

. Progress in Brain Research

, 100, 157-162

Ader, R., Cohen, N., & Felten, D.L. (2001).

Psychoneuroimmunology

(3rded.). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Spiritual and psychological Stress. (2000).

Life Positive Foundation

. Retrieved April 21, 2008, from http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/psychology/stress/psychological-stress.asp

Dumbleton, T., (2005). Dealing with Emotional Stress; The Hardest Thing in the World? Retrieved April 15, 2008, from http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Trevor-Dumbleton-406/stress-3552.php

Dealing With Stress – The Hardest Thing in the World?

When you are stressed, the hardest thing in the world is dealing with stress.

Date of Article:

30Nov2005

Category:

Health & Fitness

View(205) EasyPublish(191)

Torpy, J. M. (2007). Acute Emotional Stress and the Heart.

JAMA

, 298, !!!!!!!!!!

Vol. 298 NO 3.

Stress and Your Performance (????).

Stress Management from Mind Tools

. Retrieved April 22, 2008, from http://www.mindtools.com/stress/UnderstandStress/StressPerformance.htm