What causes stress?

In normal working life, much of our stress is subtle and occurs without obvious threat to survival. Most comes from things like work overload, conflicting priorities, inconsistent values, over-challenging deadlines, conflict with co-workers, unpleasant environments and so on. Not only do these reduce our performance as we divert mental effort into handling them, they can also cause a great deal of unhappiness.

In becoming stressed, people must therefore make two main judgments: firstly they must feel threatened by the situation, and secondly they must doubt that their capabilities and resources are sufficient to meet the threat

What happens during a stressful episode?

When there is perceived threat, the body responds by secreting certain ‘stress hormones’. These hormones help us to run faster and fight harder. They increase heart rate and blood pressure, delivering more oxygen and blood sugar to power important muscles. They increase sweating in an effort to cool these muscles, and help them stay efficient. They divert blood away from the skin to the core of our bodies, reducing blood loss if we are damaged. And as well as this, these hormones focus our attention on the threat, to the exclusion of everything else. All of this significantly improves our ability to survive life-threatening events.

But not all situations are life threatening………

True. In less severe situations, the response is also less dramatic, but since the situation is persistent, the response is also persistent. This means that in stress due to reasons mentioned above, your body continues to work above its optimal self and enter what is called as the ‘General Adaptation mode’. Though this can continue for sometime, the body soon enters an ‘exhaustion phase’ which is the ‘burn out’ you feel, when the body begins to give up performing above normal levels.

But what is important is that the body’s response is based not only on real threat, but also on perceived threat. So if you feel you are stressed, your body also responds accordingly.