What Is Stress?

Our society sees stress as a part of everyday life, we can see evidence of this in human evolution, the species that best adapted to the environment and its changes were those that prevailed, continued to evolve, and we can find today. This leads us to a question, what is stress? Actually scientists don’t have a concept of what stress is because is subjective sensations; however, one of the definitions says that “Stress is the term used to describe the physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral response to events that are appraised as threatening or challenging”(Ciccarelli and White).

The word stress was first used in psychology nearly 50 years ago by Hans Selye, a scientist that experimented with rats in order to see the physical reactions that they suffer when changes were made; the results of these experiments were similar to some consequences found in humans.

Stress may come from different sources, one of them is the stress that we acquired through the environment in which we live, this may be work, school, family, etc; which are defined as stressors. All this stress affects people in different ways; physical and emotional health has to do with the level of stress a person can tolerate. However, not all stress is bad for our health, it is often necessary for our daily functioning.

Stressors are situations or events that cause stress; these stressors may be physical and psychological. Most of the stressors are psychological, and exist in a large range of severity, from life threatening events as crashes and fires, to events that result annoying and irritating to people as losing something, delays, long lines to buy something, etc. There are two kinds of stressors; Eustress and Distress.

All people suffer from stres...

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...e that are optimist appear to be less affected by stress than the people that are pessimistic.

Studies have shown that gender have a relationship with stress management, females tend to talk and use social techniques to release stress, unlike males who are more likely to get angry, and avoid stressors. The chemical way in which the body reacts to stress depend on the sex of the individual; the interaction of oxytocin (stress hormone) with the sex hormones is different. In males cause or increases physical stress; however, in females it reduces the stress response. Those are the principal reasons of why males tend to have more heart attacks than females.

The influence that stressors have in personality can be changed in a positive way by adequate coping methods. In the next table are some coping skills and examples of the right attitude to confront it.