Psychological Component | Managing Stress Tips | Dealing With Stress

Personal circumstances causing stress

August 7th, 2008 |

Author: admin

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.