UNDERSTANDING STRESS

What is stress, and what can cause it?
Life without stimulus would be incredibly dull and boring. Life with too much stimulus becomes unpleasant and tiring, and may ultimately damage your health or well-being. Too much stress can seriously interfere with your ability to perform effectively.

The art of stress management is to keep yourself at a level of stimulation that is healthy and enjoyable. This series of articles will help you to monitor and control stress so that you can find and operate at a level that is most comfortable for you. It will discuss strategies to reduce or eliminate sources of unpleasant stress.

It will also explain what can happen when you do not control stress properly. Most people realize that aspects of their work and lifestyle can cause stress. While this is true, it is also important to note that it can be caused by your environment and by the food and drink you consume. There are several major sources of stress:

Survival Stress: this may occur in cases where your survival or health is threatened, where you are put under pressure, or where you experience some unpleasant or challenging event. Here adrenaline is released in your body and you experience all the symptoms of your body preparing for 'fight or flight'.

Internally Generated Stress: this can come from anxious worrying about events beyond your control, from a tense, hurried approach to life, or from relationship problems caused by your own behavior. It can also come from an 'addiction' to and enjoyment of stress

Environmental and Job Stress: here your living or working environment causes the stress. It may come from noise, crowding, pollution, untidiness, dirt or other distractions. Alternatively stress can come from events at work.

Fatigue and Overwork: here stress builds up over a long period. This can occur where you try to achieve too much in too little time, or where you are not using effective time management strategies.

Internally Generated Stress & Anxiety
Your personality can affect the way in which you experience stress. You may be familiar with the idea of 'type A' personalities who thrive on stress, and 'type B' personalities who are mellower and more relaxed in their approach.

Stress can cause the levels of a neurotransmitter called noradrenalin to rise. This can give a feeling of confidence and elation that type As like. They can therefore subconsciously defer work until the last minute to create a 'deadline high', or can create a stressful environment at work that feeds their enjoyment of a situation.
The downside of this is that they may leave jobs so late that they fail when an unexpected crisis occurs. This may also cause unnecessary stress for other colleagues who are already under a high level of stress.

Other aspects of personality can cause stress. Examples are:
Perfectionism, where the perfectionist's extremely or impossibly high
standards can cause stress excessive self-effacement, where constant attention to the needs of others can lead to dissatisfaction when no-one looks after your needs, and anxiety.

Anxiety
Anxiety occurs where you are concerned that circumstances are out of control. In some cases being anxious and worrying over a problem may generate a solution. Normally it will just result in negative thinking. Albert Ellis listed the five main unrealistic desires or beliefs that cause anxiety: The desire always to have the love and admiration of all people important to you. This is unrealistic because you have no control over other people's minds.
They can have bad days, see things in odd ways, make mistakes or can be plain disagreeable and awkward. The desire to be thoroughly competent at all times.

This is unrealistic because you only achieve competence at a new level by making mistakes. Everybody has bad days and makes mistakes. The belief that external factors cause all misfortune. Often negative events can be caused by your own negative attitudes. Similarly your own negative attitudes can cause you to view neutral events negatively. Someone else might find something positive in
something you view as a problem. The desire that events should always turn out the way that you want them to, and that people should always do what you want.

Other people have their own agendas and do what they want to do. The belief that past bad experience will inevitably control what will happen in the future. You can very often improve or change things if you try hard enough or look at things in a different way.