Entries Tagged 'Causes Of Stress' ↓

The latest definition of stress is:

The inability of our body to cope with the excess demands that any situation asks for.

Stress occurs due to various reasons like changes in lifestyle or environment, changes at work, family, or financial problems.

Stress can come in three forms. These three forms are emotional stress, physical stress, and chemical stress.

Emotional stress is the stress that we feel in reaction to certain events in our lives and this is the most common form of stress that we are familiar with today. This deals with feelings of tension and irritability and other extreme emotional reactions to events.

Physical stress can arise from physical demands that we place on our body – overtiredness, not enough sleep, pushing our bodies beyond the limits or even physical injury.

Chemical stress deal with the environment that we live in and the types of chemicals that we ingest in our daily lives – either through pollutants in the air or embedded in the food that we eat. These chemicals places a strain on our body and general health and leads to chemical stress in our bodies.

It is clear that this new definition of stress permeates our every day live to a large extent and it is up to us to manage all the various aspects of our daily live that can contribute to any of these types of stresses.

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What is a stress diary?
You know that you ’suffer from stress’, you know that you fly off the handle at the slighted provocation because you are always feeling tired and irritable - but you don’t know why and you feel powerless to stop it.

Keeping a stress diary is a useful way of identifying those things that cause you stress, and how much stress they actually cause you!

How does a stress diary work?
Basically you need to keep a diary each day and take note of the following:

• Date and time of entry
• Whether there was any particular event that made you feel tense and stressed
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how stressed did you feel
• What symptoms of stress were you exhibiting
• How did you handle the stress (if at all!)

You should keep this diary over a period of time such as a couple of weeks so that you can start identifying patterns of behaviors and events. Soon you will start to be able to identify:

• Which events outside your control is causing you stress (examples include standing in queues, dealing with obnoxious customers etc) and how you reacted to these events. Remember, ultimately it is your own behavior, your reaction to the event that is causing you stress. You need to learn how to modify your behavior to these events so that you experience less stress. As soon as you can identify your behavioral patterns and your reactions to certain events, you can start to manage your stress levels.
• Which stressors were self induced BY your behavior? Examples would include – ignoring the alarm clock and then getting stressed because you are late for work, or, the killer, taking on too much responsibility and work because you think you can handle it and then running out of time (and feeling stressed as a consequence) to complete the tasks.

As soon as you can identify your responses to stressful events and the behaviors that are causing self-induced stress levels you can start doing something about it.

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Work related stress probably contributes the most to stress these days since such a lot of our time is taken up by the world of work. Various sets of circumstances that are work related have been identified as being stressful. These include, for example, taking on a new role at work or changing jobs, losing your job, partner starts a new job.

All of these are easily identifiable, however, it is the insidious continuous stress-inducing events that is not mentioned on the scale that seems to be a major source of stress today. Examples are:
- Overwork : Too many of us take on too much responsibilities, either through choice (Personality Type A) or through major changes in the place of work such as ‘downsizing’, and slowing down of the economy. Lots of organizations, when the economy gets tough, save money through making people redundant. What this often means in practice is that the same amount of work needs to be done with less people. Often the staff who remain get saddled with the responsibility of doing their own, as well as their deposed colleague’s work. In fear of losing their own jobs, they often just knuckle under and start doing the extra work without complaining.
- Technological advances in the workplace: Technology is advancing at a rapid pace and new technological equipment and tools are deployed in the workplace on an almost daily basis. The employee is expected to keep up but lots of people are just not technically inclined and this leads to technostress - the inability to cope with technological changes in the workplace.
- Too much information. We are living in an information age, and the focus of the workplace is changing to working with information. A large portion of this is linked to the way that we can now access information in volumes unheard of previously. This volume of information is not necessarily a good thing since it places a strain on our abilities to process the information. Each piece of information such as a news bulletin, an advertisement, an email, a voicemail, a telephone call, an SMS, an Instant Message - all of these pieces of information must be assessed, processed and acted upon. This is placing a tremendous amount of strain on us with regards to the amount of time that we have available to get things done in day. Every piece of information that we need to process makes a demand on our time and interrupts out train of thought. Trying to do too many things at the same time is a typical symptom of extreme Type A type personality behavior, but frankly, with the way that our world is structured, it is difficult to avoid that. You get bombarded with pieces of information wherever you go - in the train and in the bus and driving to work you might listen to the news on the radio, be bombarded with giant advertisements adorning the sides of the roads, the sides of buildings and inside shop windows advertising new products and services, see a couple of TV commercials and news bulletins while waiting in a queue for coffee or in the bank, deal with two or three urgent phone calls that came through while you were traveling, as well as a couple of SMS messages informing you of a meeting that has been scheduled urgently that you need to attend. That is why one of the stress management techniques that can be applied is to limit yourself to the amount of information that you need to handle!
- Travel and commuting - not all of us can afford to live close to our places of work and some of us have to travel long hours to get to work. It can be tremendously frustrating to spend a couple of hours per day just traveling in adverse conditions - whether that be crammed together like sardines in stuffy and hot underground trains, or sitting in your car in a traffic jam with no end in site, knowing all the while that your kids are waiting to be fetched, the supper still needs to be prepared and you will have even less time for yourself.

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Personal events are closely related to family since our lives are not lived in isolation, but in relation to other people, often family members. But personal stress-full events would be events such as going to prison, which is also ranked high on the Holmes and Rahe scale, or moving house, or taking up a new hobby, or stopping smoking, or trying to control your anger and so forth.

Quite a lot of personal events that one would think should not cause stress CAN be stressful, due once again to the nature of the change that one has to go through. An example of this is “Outstanding personal achievement”. One always think that an outstanding personal achievement would be a wonderful thing, but associated with this event would be changes such as coping with the empty feeling of not having a goal to strive towards any more and coping with ‘15 minutes of fame’ if it is such a type of achievement.

Other stress-full circumstances would be health related - especially if suffering from a serious injury or illness. Why illness can be such a stressful event is apart from the physical aspects of the illness, is that there is a huge psychological component to ill-health. This stress aspect can apply equally to the family of the person who is sick, as to the sick person himself.

The fact of the matter is that during the past 50 to 60 years there has been a tremendous change in the structure of society and family life - previously there used to be a much tighter cohesion in family structures, the old looked after the young and vice versa when it became necessary, women didn’t work so much out of the home so there were always a spare person available to look after the sick and the elderly. These days, families are torn apart by divorce, moving away to foreign countries and women have full-day jobs and in some cases, everyone in the family holds down more than one job at the same time, leaving little time and energy to care for someone who is sick. This means that if there is ill-health in the family, the people who need to take on the burden of care is often subjected to a great deal of stress in having to do so.

Apart from that, being sick these days inevitably carries the fear of losing your job or becoming so disabled that you cannot care for your family. Admittedly, this has been a problem since time began - if you were sick then you couldn’t hunt for food and your family probably starved to death.

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Financial aspects figured quite high on the Holmes and Rahe scale - for example, being affected by large debt or being involved in bankruptcy actually scored higher than the death of a close friend. This is because a sever change in financial status can bring about drastic changes in life-style such as for example the loss of a house, disruption of family life, not to speak of the psychological stress with regards to loss of status and self-esteem.

The constant stress and worry about finances can also be very stressful over longer term periods. Obviously when the economy becomes bad there are knock-on effects that can be very stressful and that each feature individually on the stress scale - this can include circumstances such as the loss of a job, having to move house, having a spouse take on a new job, having to work harder with less free time.

It must be remembered that we are all subjected to these stressful and life-changing events - everyone suffers from the economic consequences of a bad housing market, higher interest rates, foreclosures, becoming bankrupt, losing a job etc etc. But it is how we each react to these events that makes the difference between experience high stress and not being as stressed. Some people are just more resilient to some types of stresses than others.

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Obviously the death of a partner is absolutely the highest level of stress that one can experience. There are other events that might seem to be events that should NOT be stressful, but since these circumstances signify a major change in your life they ARE stressful. You need to let go of the old way of doing things and make a change to the new. You need to re-draw the map of your world and re-learn the territory. Examples of these types of stressful circumstances are getting married, moving house, or being reconciled with a partner.

It is noticeable how many sources of stress stem from family related events - it is maybe not that surprising since most aspects of our lives revolve around family, friends and relationships. Examples are marital relationships, sexual difficulties, pregnancy and giving birth, relationships with the in-laws, the neighbors and other family members.

Divorce is endemic to our society these days and according to the Holmes and Rahe scale, it is actually the second most stressful event that you can experience, apart from the death of the partner. Yet it is almost expected these days to shrug off the emotional pain associated with this event and continue with life as if nothing major has happened. Just the fact that divorce is not seen as being such an unusual event any more makes it even more stressful to handle. As opposed to getting almost the same level of support and sympathy from family and friends that one would expect with the death of a loved one, when one gets divorced these days the same level of support is not always forthcoming.

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In the broadest scheme of things there are two types of stress - the type is largely self-induced and the type that causes you stress due to unforeseen or foreseen life-changing events.

Self-induced stress is largely due to your personality. Some personality types are just more inclined to ’stress themselves out’. This type of stress is mostly due to working too hard, having too little time, feeling out of control the whole time…

The other type of stress is due to major life-changing events that you might, or might not have control over. Some examples of events that you have control over are getting married, moving house, having a new baby. But then there are those events that you have no control over such as illness, death of a loved one and so forth. BOTH these types of events are stressful, even the so-called ‘happy’ events. The reason for this is that a change in life-style disrupts your routine, it destroys the mental map that you had of the world and it forces you to create a new map. Coupled with this can be extreme emotions such as grief, anger and feelings of loss. Altogether, these feelings add up and can cause stress - feeling of anxiety and fear, depression and anger.

These types of changes can be broadly grouped into these four categories:
- Family
- Personal
- Work
- Finances

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