Stress is the new illness of the century, and it is our body’s response to change. Everyone experiences stress at some point of his or her life. It varies among people, because everyone responds to challenging or stressful situations differently. Those who know how to handle, and overcome it; live healthy lives. However, those who struggle with it and do not seek help, live in misery and usually get worse.
Stress left unchecked, could lead to depression and suicide or other body functioning related issues such as: eating and sleeping disorders which include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating, and insomnia. Stress weakens the nervous system, and the immune system which takes away the body’s ability to fight viruses, and thus makes the person more prone to diseases. Stress can cause a lot of harm to our bodies if ignored, especially that there are no clear symptoms that could alarm us of its existence, because most of the known symptoms usually get confused with other diseases.
There many different types of stress. Stress could be caused by happy and good events not only difficult and challenging situations. According to Stress: A Social Issue article, Brunet argued that “A stressful event can neither be a happy one (wedding, birth, travel, etc.) or an upsetting one (getting fired, going through a divorce, the loss of a loved one, etc.)”. Stress could result in poor performance and reduces efficiency and productivity. According to 25 Surprising Ways Stress Affects Your Health article “Studies of employees ranging from military personnel to bankers show that stress reduces productivity and satisfaction at work, and is linked to depression too”.
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Stress that is left unchecked could lead to depression, which could lead to thoughts of suicide and actual suicide attempts. However, not all stress is unsound and an example of a sound stress is, when students are taking a test, if they have the right amount of stress, which psychologist call ‘optimal arousal’ which helps them do well on the test, because they have enough motivation to study for the test and enough calmness and anxiety to do their best. With too much stress students do poorly, because they are so overwhelmed that they cannot focus or concentrate on anything, but their fear of the test, the body becomes busy calming down its own nervousness, and does not really focus on the person’s performance on the test.
With too little or no stress the student also does not do well because they feel like it is not a big deal, so they simply do not care. For best performance, the body needs to be optimally aroused. Different things could cause stress, for example, social pressure, environmental or cultural pressure, and innate pressure that comes from the person’s mind and brain. As was mentioned in Stress-Related Problems article “There are generally four categories of stressors: social, environmental, physical, and cognitive”.
An example of social pressure is when women worry too much about how they look, and look up to the models they see on TV and try to lose weight, use beauty products and plastic surgeries to look like them; Or if the person has an avoidant personality which makes him/her fear social rejection could also cause stress. An example of environmental pressure would be animals trying to survive and escape their predators, or humans trying to survive a natural disaster. An example of cognitive stress would be rumination or overthinking of negative things that happened in one’s life, which could lead to depression and suicide.
