Stress and Health

Stress is the term used to describe the physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses to events that are appraised as threatening or challenging. Stress-causing events are called stressors.

They are 2 types of stressors. Distress: Occurs when people experience unpleasant stressors. Eustress: Results from positive events that still make demands on a person to adapt or change, or recently defined as the optimal amount of stress that people need to promote health and well being.

Cognitive view of stress.
-Primary appraisal: Involves estimating the severity of the stressor and classifying it as a threat, a challenge, or a harm or loss that has already occurred.
-Secondary appraisal: People who have identified a threat or harmful effect must estimate the resources that they have for coping with the stressor. If resources are perceived as adequate, then the degree of stress will be considerably less than if resources are missing or lacking.

Sources of stress.
-Pressure: Urgent demands or expectations for a person's behavior coming from an outside source
-Uncontrollability: Degree of control that the person has over a particular event or situation. Lesser the control, greater the degree of stress.
-Frustration: External and Internal frustrations. External frustrations are things such as losses, rejections, failures and delays. Internal frustrations occur when a goal or need cannot be attained because of internal or personal characteristics.
-Aggression: Actions meant to harm or destroy. Closely linked to frustration. Aggression is a frequent and persistent response to frustration. Displaced aggression is a form of displacement, shown by expressing one's stress obtained from A to another person B, who is often less threatening or weaker.

Coping with Stress.
-Problem-focused coping: When people try to eliminate the source of a stress or reduce its impact through their own actions.
-Emotion-focused coping: A strategy that involves changing the way a person feels or emotionally reacts to a stressor.
-Ignore it. When it is not possible to change or eliminate the stressor, or when worrying about the stressor can be a problem itself, ignoring the problem is not a bad idea.

There is too much now. One's enough. Bye world.