Understanding Stress

Understanding Stress

Stress is something that we all talk about and experience but don’t really understand……… or want to. Most people don’t want to talk, much less learn, about stress and it’s effects because it’s a subject that we try to avoid at all costs. That’s why so many of us just hide from it or “soften” it when it stares us in the face. However, if you actually understood what was going on you would be able to not only cope with stress but overcome it. So, I decided to blog a step by step guide to what stress really is and what it does to you. If, you bear with me through this process I promise you will not only come out of this happier but healthier too or your money back!!

First off before you start to yawn and your eyes start to glaze over just give me a moment to give you a foundation to work with, o.k.?  Alright then, here goes. Stress can be defined as “the body’s inability to cope with its environment”, now the environment is the total surroundings  of body. For now I’ll just leave it at that. We’ll go into more detail later on after you have a firm foundation.

Next, we have to understand the General Adaptation System (or G.A.S.) principal that was brought to us from the father of stress, Han Selye basically he’s the Michael Jordan of stress. Through his studies we learned that the body goes through 3 stages in dealing with stress:

1.       Alarm reaction: this is the “fight or flight” reaction that you go through when you are scared or surprised.

2.       Adaptation: this is how you change to meet the needs of the environment.

3.       Exhaustion: This is not the exhaustion we talk about after a long tough day at work, this is the exhaustion that kills you and is very serious matter.

Now, we have to know the 3 ways that we can experience stress and we will have pretty much the basics down. These are:

1.       Physical: This is easy to understand, something physically happens to you to stress you out.

2.       Emotional: This is the “stress” most people relate to the topic, financial, kids, spouse, ect it is the “feel” when we are not happy with life.

3.       Chemical: This type of stress is one that is not even on most people’s radar, chemical stress can come from poisons (large and small), food addatives, even chemicals you make in your body as a reaction to …..you guessed it, stress. Yes, stress can cause stress.

The interesting thing about these 3 stressors is that the body reacts the same regardless of which types of stress or which combination of stressor  might be dealing with.

You now have the basics of stress (that wasn’t so bad was it) it’s like learning the alphabet before you can read, you could memorize a few words and be able to recognize or you learn the basics and read any book you want. Now you know:

What stress is?

3 reactions to Stress (GAS)

3 types of stress (physical, chemical, emotional)

Next time, Is Stress Real?