What is Stress?
We define Stress as all tensions that we experience in our daily life. Stress is the response that is caused by a Stressor (Stressful event). The Stressors can come from outside (external) but can also be caused by ourselves (internal). Examples of external Stressors are social, economical, political, and biological forces that create changes in our life, body, and status. Internal Stressors, on the other hand, are forces that arise through our feelings, emotions, and thoughts. A good example is the well-known placebo effect. For almost everybody, the word Stress has negative connotations. Every challenge, stimulus, task, activity, or occurrence involves pressure or tensions. As long as we ourselves consider these stimuli as a challenge, there is no question of Stress, even if these challenges cause us trouble, cost energy, or are a great sacrifice. Many people exhaust themselves in Mountaineering, rack their brains at an exciting chess tournament, and feel good when they have to reach targets at work, study or other activities. Positive Stress gives color to life, makes it stimulating and often helps us to achieve more. Lack of Stress (boredom for instance) and continuous exposure to high intense Stress, however, can be harmful. Later, we will see how our body and mind react to Stress and what effects Stress has on our mind.
What is it that determines whether Stress is damaging or not? People who are immune to Stress can often cope better under the same circumstances because they see the occurrences as a challenge. They often have the feeling that they can influence the situation and have the strong inner conviction about the sense, necessity, and controllability of circumstances. Besides, they radiate self-confidence, have the ability to cope with setbacks, and their own immunity to Stress. Our point of view is that the manner in which we see things and how we handle them determines whether we experience Stress. In other words, it is not so much the Stressors that determine how much Stress we experience, but how we see them, value them, and what we do with them. Research has shown that if we succeed in becoming conscious of our options and pay attention to the relevance and the effectiveness of our reactions in those situations, we can keep a proper control on our experience of Stress and consequently can influence whether or not this will lead to diseases (Kabat-Zinn). This means that an event can be considered as being Stressful by one person and as a non-event by another. When you consider an event a threat to your well-being, it will be damaging. Therefore, perception of the problem is crucial to the amount of Stress that you experience.
The practice is that the majority of people react automatically to Stress. Moreover, the longer we experience Stress, the less sensitive of recognizing the Stress symptoms we become. We feel tense for a moment and, for example, as a response, we unconsciously walk to the coffee machine or our fridge. Automatic responses, by definition, almost always aggravate Stress. They prevent us from seeing clearly and consequently making the right decisions, solve problems creatively, and express our emotions properly. Before you know it, you will find yourself in a vicious circle and the effects result to some complaints or other. When we are capable of becoming more conscious of our Stressors, of the Stress process, and the results of our reaction and capability of improving them, we can change our experience of the Stress situation. When we change the experience, we can also change the impact of the harmfull effects from Stress on ourselves. Recognizing and observing the Stress reactions and tensions in yourself are prerequisites for moving on and striking at the root of the problem. According to Coleman's well-known book 'Emotional Intelligence', true emotional intelligence characterizes itself by being good at recognizing feelings and thoughts in yourself when they occur. Therefore, the next step is to learn how our body and mind react to Stress.
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After you reach the age of forty,extreme fatigue is harder on you. It affects the nervous system and produces irritability, nervousness, restlessness, and insomnia. It lowers your resistance to disease. Acute fatigue is the inevitable result of severe physical or emotional strain.That is the time when it definitely needs your attention,and steps for calming the body and mind.
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Chronic fatigue is the commonest symptom of a nervous breakdown. It's the fatigue that rises in the brain because of poor nerves. It means that the brain is tired and functioning badly. You may be unable to read without discomfort. You forget a paragraph as soon as you've read it, and may find yourself reading the same sentence over and over again. Your brain tires and becomes tense. The distress you feel in your eyes cannot be helped by glasses: It's caused by the poor condition of your nerves. This type of fatigue represents a danger signal that should never be disregarded.
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"You must stop worrying because it never helps you, but in your case it produces indigestion. It tenses your nervous system, stops the full flow of digestive juices, and as a result you manufacture gases and acids in the digestive tract. Some of these poisonous materials are absorbed by the blood, which carries them all over the body. When your nerves are bathed in this too acid blood the reaction is pain, which in your case is known as neuritis (nerve inflammation)."
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'Emotions such as worry, anger, fretting, envy, spite, jealousy, hopelessness, cowardice, fear depressing and negative. They tense the body, waste its energies, and upset the equilibrium of the physical structures. Violent depressing emotions actually produce poisons within the body.'
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'Chronic fatigue is the commonest symptom of a nervous breakdown. It's the fatigue that rises in the brain because of poor nerves. It means that the brain is tired and functioning badly.'
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"One of the major causes of nervousness in persons of all ages is a calcium deficiency, and this deficiency increases as you grow older."
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Basics & Backgrounds
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