What is stress? How to deal with stress - Medical News Today
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We generally use the word "stress" when we feel that everything seems to have become too much - we are overloaded and wonder whether we really can cope with the pressures placed upon us.
Anything that poses a challenge or a threat to our well-being is a stress. Some stresses get you going and they are good for you - without any stress at all many say our lives would be boring and would probably feel pointless. However, when the stresses undermine both our mental and physical health they are bad. In this text we shall be focusing on stress that is bad for you.
The difference between "stress" and "a stressor" - a stressor is an agent or stimulus that causes stress. Stress is the feeling we have when under pressure, while stressors are the things we respond to in our environment. Examples of stressors are noises, unpleasant people, a speeding car, or even going out on a first date. Generally (but not always), the more stressors we experience, the more stressed we feel.
Fight or flight response
The way you respond to a challenge may also be a type of stress. Part of your response to a challenge is physiological and affects your physical state. When faced with a challenge or a threat, your body activates resources to protect you - to either get away as fast as you can, or fight.
If you are upstairs at home and an earthquake starts, the faster you can get yourself and your family out the more likely you are all to survive. If you need to save somebody's life during that earthquake, by lifting a heavy weight that has fallen on them, you will need components in your body to be activated to give you that extra strength - that extra push.
Our fight-or-flight response is our body's sympathetic nervous system reacting to a stressful event. Our body produces larger quantities of the chemicals cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline, which trigger a higher heart rate, heightened muscle preparedness, sweating, and alertness - all these factors help us protect ourselves in a dangerous or challenging situation.
Non-essential body functions slow down, such as our digestive and immune systems when we are in fight-or flight response mode. All resources can then be concentrated on rapid breathing, blood flow, alertness and muscle use.
When we are stressed the following happens:
Breathing becomes more rapid
Digestive system slows down
Heart rate () rises
Immune system goes down
Muscles become tense
We do not sleep (heightened state of alertness)
Most of us have varying interpretations of what stress is about and what matters. Some of us focus on what happens to us, such as breaking a bone or getting a promotion, while others think more about the event itself. What really matters are our thoughts about the situations in which we find ourselves.
We are continually sizing up situations that confront us in life. We assess each situation, deciding whether something is a threat, how we can deal with it and what resources we can use. If we conclude that the required resources needed to effectively deal with a situation are beyond what we have available, we say that that situation is stressful - and we react with a classical stress response. On the other hand, if we decide our available resources and skills are more than enough to deal with a situation, it is not seen as stressful to us.
How we respond to stress affects our health
We do not all interpret each situation in the same way.
Because of this, we do not all call on the same resources for each situation
We do not all have the same resources and skills.
Some situations which are not negative ones may still be perceived as stressful. This is because we think we are not completely prepared to cope with them effectively. Examples being: having a baby, moving to a nicer house, and being promoted. Having a baby is usually a wonderful thing, so is being promoted or moving to a nicer house. But, moving house is a well-known source of stress.
A hectic home life can cause you to feel stressed and exhausted
It is important to learn that what matters more than the event itself is usually our thoughts about the event when we are trying to manage stress. How you see that stressful event will be the largest single factor that impacts on your physical and . Your interpretation of events and challenges in life may decide whether they are invigorating or harmful for you.
A persistently negative response to challenges will eventually have a negative effect on your health and happiness. Experts say people who tend to perceive things negatively need to understand themselves and their reactions to stress-provoking situations better.
Then they can learn to manage stress more successfully.
- people who believe their stress is affecting their health in a big way are twice as likely to have a
ten years later, according to researchers at the University of Western Ontario.
First author, Dr Hermann Nabi, believes that doctors should bear in mind patients' subjective perceptions of stress when deciding on treatment.
In another study carried out at Pennsylvania State University, the investigators found that . It appears that how patients react to stress is a predictor of their health a decade later, regardless of their present health and stressors.
Lead researcher, Professor David Almeida said "For example, if you have a lot of work to do today and you are really grumpy because of it, then you are more likely to suffer negative health consequences 10 years from now than someone who also has a lot of work to do today, but doesn't let it bother her."
- in 2011, scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago explained that stress may be associated with
aggressiveness among minority populations.
Principal investigator, Garth H. Rauscher, Ph.D., said "We found that after diagnosis, black and Hispanic
patients reported higher levels of stress than whites, and that stress was associated with
aggressiveness."
Some of the effects of stress on your body, your thoughts and feelings, and on your behavior:
Effect on your body
A tendency to sweat
Chest pain
- researchers at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia published a report in Pediatrics in October 2012 explaining that . Lead researcher, Elizabeth Prout-Parks, M.D., said
"Stress in parents may be an important risk factor for child obesity and related behaviors. The severity and number of stressors are important."
Examples of stressors include mental health problems, poor physical health, financial strain, and trying to manage in a single-parent household.
Cramps or muscle spasms
Fainting spells
Hypertension ()
Loss of libido
Lower immunity against diseases
Muscular aches
Nail biting
Nervous twitches
Pins and needles
Sleeping difficulties
Effect on your thoughts and feelings
Feeling of insecurity
Forgetfulness
Irritability
Problem concentrating
Restlessness
Effect on your behavior
Eating too much
Eating too little
Food cravings
Sudden angry outbursts
Drug abuse
Alcohol abuse
Higher tobacco consumption
Social withdrawal
Frequent crying
Relationship problems
What are the common causes of stress?
We all react differently to stressful situations. What one person finds stressful another may not at all. Almost anything can cause stress and it has different triggers. For some people, on some occasions, just thinking about something, or several small things that accumulate, can cause stress.
The most common causes of stress are:
Stressed at work? A
conducted by the charity Mind suggested found that 34% of people considered their jobs to be very stressful.
Bereavement
Family problems
Financial matters
Job issues - according to a UK charity "Mind",
in British people's lives, concerning factors that may have a significant impact on their wellbeing.
Lack of time
Moving home
Relationships (including divorce)
The following are also causes of stress
Becoming a mother or a father
Conflicts in the workplace
Driving in bad traffic
Fear of crime
Losing your job
Miscarriage
Noisy neighbors
Overcrowding
Retirement
Too much noise
Uncertainty (awaiting laboratory test results, academic exam results, job interview results, etc)
It is possible that a person feels stressed and no clear cause is identified. A feeling of frustration, anxiety and depression can make some people feel stressed more easily than others.
Maternal stress and bullying later on at school
, researchers from the University of Warwick, England, reported in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
The researchers had gathered and examined data on 14,000 moms and 8,829 children. They evaluated mothers' post-natal period, family adversity, anxiety and depression during pregnancy, as well as bullying incidences among their children aged from 7 to 10 years.
They found that mental stress during pregnancy impacted on the child's chances of being bullied later on.
Lead researcher, Professor Dieter Wolke, said "Changes in the stress response system can affect behavior and how children react emotionally to stress such as being picked on by a bully. Children who more easily show a stress reaction such as crying, running away, anxiety are then selected by bullies to home in to. The whole thing becomes a vicious cycle, a child with an altered stress response system is more likely to be bullied, which affects their stress response even further and increases the likelihood of them developing mental health problems in later life."
Diagnosis of stress
A good primary care physician (GP - General Practitioner) should be able to diagnose stress based on the patient's symptoms alone. Some doctors may wish to run some tests, such as a blood or urine, or a health assessment.
The diagnosis of stress depends on many factors and is complex, say experts. A wide range of approaches to stress diagnosis have been used by health care professionals, such as the use of questionnaires, biochemical measures, and physiological techniques. Experts add that the majority of these methods are subject to experimental error and should be viewed with caution. The most practicable way to diagnose stress and its effects on a person is through a comprehensive, stress-oriented, face-to-face interview.
How to deal with stress
There are three broad methods you can follow to treat stress, they include self-help, self management, and medication.
Self help for treating stress
Exercise - exercise has been proven to have a beneficial effect on a person's mental and physical state. For many people exercise is an extremely effective stress buster.
Division of labor - try to delegate your responsibilities at work, or share them. If you make yourself indispensable the likelihood of your feeling highly stressed is significantly greater.
Assertiveness - don't say yes to everything. If you can't do something well, or if something is not your responsibility, try to seek ways of not agreeing to do them.
Alcohol and drugs - alcohol and drugs will not help you manage your stress better. Either stop consuming them completely, or cut down.
Caffeine - if your consumption of
and other drinks which contain caffeine is high, cut down.
Nutrition - eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. Make sure you have a healthy and balanced diet.
Time - make sure you set aside some time each day just for yourself. Use that time to organize your life, relax, and pursue your own interests.
Breathing - there are some effective breathing techniques which will slow down your system and help you relax.
Talk - talk to you family, friends, work colleagues and your boss. Express your thoughts and worries.
Seek professional help - if the stress is affecting
go and see your doctor.
Heightened stress for prolonged periods can be bad for your physical and mental health.
Relaxation techniques - meditation, massage, or yoga have been known to greatly help people with stress.
Stress management techniques
Stress management can help you to either remove or change the source of stress, alter the way you view a stressful event, lower the impact that stress might have on your body, and teach you alternative ways of coping. Stress management therapy will have the objective of pursuing one or more of these approaches.
Stress management techniques can be gained if you read self-help books, or attend a stress management course. You can also seek the help of a counselor or psychotherapist for personal development or therapy sessions.
Many therapies which help you relax, such as aromatherapy, or reflexology, may have a beneficial effect.
Doctors will not usually prescribe medications for coping with stress, unless the patient has an underlying illness, such as depression or some type of anxiety. If that is the case, the doctor is actually treating a mental illness. In such cases, an
may be prescribed. Bear in mind that there is a risk that all the medication will do is mask the stress, rather than help you deal and cope with it.
Many ways of Coping with Stress
In the video below, Cary Lynn Cooper CBE, an American-born British psychologist and professor of organizational psychology and health at Lancaster University Management School, England, talks about the many ways there are for coping with stress.
Written by Christian Nordqvist
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回答英语问题What's your father?What do you have on Fridays? When is Children's Day?What is your teacher doing now?是回答
回答英语问题What's your father?What do you have on Fridays?&When is Children's Day?What is your teacher doing now?是回答
—What's your father?—my father is a teacher/manager/doctor...—What do you have on Fridays?—I often watch films.—When is Children's Day?—June,first.—What is your teacher doing now?—sorry,I don't know./he is sleeping.
你父亲是干什么的?你在星期五有什么吗?儿童节是什么时候?你的老师现在在做什么? 好的采纳哦！
watch TVJune 1My teacher is
reading newspapers
1,my father is a farmer2i usually watch tv on friday3it is on june the first4he is reading book
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那句你星期五做了什么
你爸爸是干什么职业的？你生日那天穿的什么？哪天是儿童节？你的老师现在在干什么？
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T.S. Eliot&(65).&&The Sacred Wood.&&1921.&Hamlet and His Problems
&FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a W and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a C and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.
&&Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, observing that&&&&&&&&they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare’ and as they insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.
&&Qua work of art, the work of art c there is
we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison t and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their “interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.
&&We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of F and what this play was like we can guess from three clues: from the Spanish Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd’s Hamlet must have been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare’s lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not from the later, play. From these three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was a revenge- that the action or delay is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch
and that the “madness” of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of nec and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the Spanish Tragedy as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes—the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which th these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson’s examination is, we believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.
&&Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespe and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like&&&&&&&&&&Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act v. sc. ii.,&&&&&&&&Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep…
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark
Grop’d I to find out them:
Finger’
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other profoundly interesting play of “intractable” material and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as “interesting” as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.
&&The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:&&&&&&&&&&[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his mother’s degradation.… The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the “guilt of a mother” that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot point t indeed, if you examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of Bussy d’ Ambois, Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare’s Hamlet not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the earlier play.
&&The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find th you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the ext and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequa his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which
he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible ac and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in H it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.
&&The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’ in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of s it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fi the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Lafor the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many fa and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
&I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer’s objections to Othello.&[]&
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