Chapter 5: Stress and Health

Every human deals with stress, as it is a normal part of life. Different situation can lead to stress whereby you are required to make changes and adapt with the new environment. However, failure in doing so may cause different types of stress towards our body.

How do psychologist define stress?

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

Stress can be divided into two groups which are distress and eustress. Distress is stress affected by unpleasant and undesirable stressor, such as divorce, punishment, injury and financial problems. Whereas eustress is stress in daily life that has positive connotations, includes marriage, having a baby, new friends, and for us students who are taking exams, performing our speech and having a tournament to compete with the opponent. This type of stress requires a change in one’s habits, responsibilities, and lifestyles, thus creating stress.

The factors or events that cause a stress is known as stressors.

The effects of stress towards our body can be divided into four groups that are physical, emotional, cognitive or mental process, and behavioral response. Chronic fatigue, acne, migraines, and hypertension are included in physical problems of stress. People under stress also often lose sense of humor, problems in concentration, memory and decision making are some of the mental symptoms of stress. Whereas in emotional manner, people experience depression, irritability, panic attacks, anger and frustration. Behavioral symptoms may also occur towards people who are under stress that includes eating disorders, sleep deprivation, crying a lot, and hitting or throwing things.

Cognitive appraisal approach that includes two steps of primary and secondary appraisal states that how people think about a stressor determines, at least in part, how stressful that stressor will become and which closely defined as how your mental respond, interpret or approach to certain events that cause the stress. Primary appraisal is when accessing a stress involves in measuring the severity of the stress and identify whether you can handle the stress as a threat or a challenge. Whereas secondary appraisal is when accessing the threat involves in finding available resources to cope the stressor so our cognitive or mental state become calm.

What kinds of external events can cause stress?

Catastrophe is an unpredictable, large-scale event that creates a tremendous need to adapt and adjust well as overwhelming feelings of threat such as the war happening in Palestine and natural disasters like earthquake, tsunami, flood, hurricane, and others. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a disorder that last for more than one month resulting from exposure to a major stressor with symptoms of anxiety, nightmares, poor sleep, reliving the event, and concentration problems such as a child being bullied many times, whereas Acute Stress Disorder (ASD) last only for one month. These two types of disorder results in depression and requires them to go for cognitive therapy to recover themselves and prescribe medicines from doctor.

Other than that, people that do not face extreme stress if catastrophe might experience major life events can cause stress by requiring adjustment such as marriage, death of family members, divorce, pregnancy and for us students, peer pressures, getting into college and making new friends with other people. Two types of major life events that measures the amount of stress in a person's life over a year period resulting from major life events which are Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) that is administrated to adults and College Undergraduate Stress Scale (CUSS) for college students.

Hassle that is daily annoyance of everyday life is one of the causes of stress. From what I have experienced, traffic jam in the morning as I want to go to college by bus, bad weather to start my day, people walking at slow pace when I want to attend a lecture, and my housemates' loud music are the hassle that leads to my stressful situation.

What are the Psychological Factors of Stress?

One of the reasons towards stressful events is pressure when there are urgent demands or expectations for a person's behavior coming from outsides sources. It is felt when people think they must work harder, faster or do more. As for me, I had some pressure when I am doing my assignments where I have to keep track of the due date so marks won't be deducted, studying for final exams to ensure good grades, and make a presentation where time is allocated thus we should not exceed it.

Uncontrollability is another factor that increases a person's experience of stress is the degree of control that the person has over a particular event or situation. The less control a person has, the greater the degree of stress. By way of example, a doctor is doing a surgery on a patient may be in an urgent situation to save his or her life but was distracted over something else and causing the patient to be in dangerous situation and eventually die. His careless actions might make him ponder upon what the careless mistakes done even it is unintentional, thus creating stress.

Frustration will occur when people are blocked or prevented from achieving a desired goal or fulfilling a perceived need such when a kid doesn't get his ice cream, he will throw his toy away. One of the possible reactions is aggression that does things aggressively and meant to harm. While displaced aggression removes one's frustration on some less threatening or more available targets. For an example, anyone who has been frustrated in work will project his or her anger at home to his spouse or child but actually intended to strike out at the boss in one's workplace. Another possible reaction to frustration is escape or withdrawal that is leaving the presence of a stressor such as dropping out of school, quitting a job and taking drugs where they think it is a solution to everything, however it is the other way round as it creates more problems.

Conflict is whenever you find yourself torn between two or more competing and incompatible desires, goals, or actions. One of the types of conflict is approach-approach conflict that occurs between two desirable goals to choose between pasta or rice for tonight's menu. Avoidance-avoidance conflict occurs between two undesirable goals such as choosing to stand on the chair or caned by teacher for not doing homework. Whereas approach-avoidance conflict occurs when a person must choose or not choose a goal that has both positive and negative aspects.

These factors may lead to a suicidal behavior by a person if it is extremely felt where it is highly linked to depression. It should always be taken seriously and help them to encounter such severe problem.

How does stress affect the physical functioning of the body and its immune system?

The General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) was founded by Hans Seyle concerning stress and its effects on the human body. There are three stages of the body's psychological reaction to stress, including alarm that reacts to a stressor and the sympathetic nervous system is activated, resistance is where the body settles into sympathetic division activity to resist the stressor, and exhaustion happens when the body's resources are gone such as illness or even death.

Personality Factors in Stress.
Type A personality: A workaholic person, ambitious, time conscious, extremely hardworking, has high levels of hostility and anger, and easily annoyed.
Type B personality: A relaxed and laid-back person, less driven and competitive, and slow to anger.
Type C personality: A pleasant person, difficult to express emotions, internalize his or her anger and anxiety, and strongly associated with cancer.
Type H or hard personality: A person who thrives on stress, lacks the anger and hostility, have deep sense of commitment in life, control of their lives and what happens, and when there is threat, it might not frighten them but they take it as a challenge.
Optimists: People who tend to look for positive outcome.
Pessimists: People who tend to look for negative outcome.

Stress and Social Factors.
Social factors increasing the effects of stress include poverty, stresses on the job or in the workplace, and others.
Acculturative stress is a stress resulting from the need to change and adapt a person's ways to the majority culture. Four methods of acculturation are integration, assimilation, separation and marginalization. Whereas social support system is the network of family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and others who can offer support, comfort, or aid to a person in need. Having good social-support system is important in a person's ability to cope with stressors.

Ways to Deal with Stress.

By coping strategies, it can help to minimize the effects of stressors. One of the alternatives is problem-focused coping that eliminate the source of stress or reduce its impact through own actions. By way of example, a student cannot understand what the lecturer is explaining although the lecturer is very well educated. Therefore, the student take an alternative to talk with the lecturer regarding the subject, ask his or her friends some questions, get a tutor, form a study group and others. Whereas emotion-focused coping to change the impact of a stressor by changing the emotional reaction to the stressor. For example, the student that unable to understand what the lecturer is teaching may share his or her problem to a friend, talking through until calm enough to solve the problem. Meditation is also another way to deal with stress so that a person can refocus his or her attention and achieve a trancelike state of conscious. There are also several ways that religious beliefs can affect the degree of stress people experience and the ability to cope with that stress, where people with religious beliefs also can cope better with stressful events as they found faith and hope.

Factors That Can Promote to Wellness.
Factors that can inhibit stress in daily live is to do exercises in order to leave your mind in peace. Other than that, you can take a good care of your health by eating healthy foods, getting enough sleep and others for a better development of your body.