Stress Can Be Positive Or Negative But Both Create Problems With
Your Health
By Regina Tayman
Defined in dictionaries as “an emotional and physical response to
threats from the outside world”, stress is a normal part of everyday
life. In one manner or another, everyone faces stressors everyday. These
stresses may come in the form of financial or economical problems faced
within the family, a medical condition of a friend or loved one,
employment or even an unhappy home life.
Each of these things is faced by millions of people every day of the
week. Stress is also caused by a variety of positive elements as well.
Meeting a challenge, reaching a personal goal or trying to get a
promotion, they are all stressors in your life, but they are not
necessarily negative stressors. Some people actually appear to thrive on
certain stressors.
A perfect example of this is a competitor at the Olympics. Although
these athletes are under an enormous amount of personal and professional
stress, it appears that the higher the stakes, the better they perform.
Some professionals categorize these individuals as “type A
personalities”. What this means is that they are “over achievers” and
are always pushing themselves to be the best at whatever it is that they
do. They take on one set of responsibilities after another and truly
seem to get depressed or saddened if they do not have an impossible
deadline looming.
For this particular series, we are going to focus on the negative
aspects of stress. What it is, what causes it, what you can do to reduce
the stress in your life, various remedies that can help you deal with
the stressors you face and when and where to get help coping if you find
the stress beginning to effect you in a negative manner either
physically or emotionally.
All stress, good or bad, has an impact on your body. Stress causes
changes in a person’s brain chemistry and significantly impacts the
body’s immune systems. Regardless of whether a person feels that the
stress in his/her life is positive or negative, there is proven medical
evidence that long-term stress will have a negative impact on the human
body.
Most adults have learned a variety of coping skills and mechanisms
throughout their lives to deal with daily stress. Children however, have
not. Chronic stressful situations in a child’s life can actually impair
their developmental growth and subsequently lead to difficulties with
learning, processing emotions and the proper handling of everyday
situations that every person faces.
It is our desire that this website will assist you in identifying the
stressors in your life and learning positive ways of dealing with the
physical and emotional ramifications of both. |
