Nowadays, stress is frequently used to explain many psychological problems and doctors that a person suffers from. Stress works like a socially well-regarded catch-all. Unlike the stigma generated by mental disorders, it does not affect the reputation of the affected person nor does it force him to consider himself ill or to recognize some type of failure. Someone who is stressed can be seen as someone active, a fighter, who energetically supports the fatigue of modern life. Thus, stress has a good press because it is linked to work, but anxiety or depression, which are the other side of the same coin, not so much because they are associated with someone who is unable to deal with day-to-day problems.
But what really is stress? This phenomenon arises when a person feels overwhelmed in her psychological resources to cope with the demands that she is forced to face in everyday life and perceives them as threatening to her personal well-being. The sources of stress can be varied: excessive professional or academic responsibilities, painful personal experiences, deep dissatisfaction with life or difficulties in compatibility of roles in working women. There are sources of stress that can arise depending on the technological advances of society. For example, technostresswhich in the most serious cases becomes technophobia, is a negative psychological state related to the inability to use the necessary technology, especially computers, to solve the problems of daily life, which especially affects older people and is It is related to feelings of anxiety, weariness and beliefs of personal worthlessness.
The perception of overflow is extraordinarily paralyzing. Stress can generate psychophysiological and emotional reactions of anxiety, but also depression and irritability, as well as health problems, such as sleep disturbances, alcohol and tobacco intake, cardiovascular problems (taking things too hard), fatigue, inadequate nutrition or worsening of a chronic disease. Likewise, prolonged stress, by having an immunosuppressive effect due to the action of cortisol, weakens the immune system and makes the body more vulnerable to infections.
What generates stress is especially, more than a specific event, the chronic tension to which a person can be subjected and that leads him to configure a lifestyle characterized by the urgency of time, excessive responsibility, lack of support family or work or excessive expectations about the person of oneself and those around him. This chronic tension can also be influenced by so-called deprivation stress, that is, the underestimation of a person’s mental or emotional processes, due, for example, to the performance of routine tasks or inaction in retirement. A chronic state of emotional deprivation leads to boredom, loneliness, and ultimately a loss of self-esteem.
Nevertheless, stress is not always negative for health. A certain degree of tension is essential for daily functioning and acts as a vital fuel. There is only one way to not have it: to be dead. Without the boost that stress provides, human beings are not able to achieve their goals. The relationship between stress and performance is distributed according to an inverted U-shaped curve. Positive stress (re) allows the person to enhance motivation, increase energy, reduce fatigue and optimize their psychological concentration resources to successfully deal with a given situation (sports, academic, work or social). In these cases, stress is not perceived as an overload, but as a challenge. But if the stress load continues to increase, performance can begin to decline and health to suffer.
people own different stress resistance thresholds, so the characteristics of the curve differ from one person to another. The risk is higher in people who are competitive, perfectionistic, and insecure, and who have poor coping skills and insufficient family and social support. But no matter how resilient some people are, they all have a point that, if crossed, invalidates stress as an adaptive resource to become a liability to health and performance. Thus, distress (negative stress) arises when there is an imbalance between the demands of the environment and the psychological resources available, especially if it is very large, lasts over time or affects the social status of the affected person. In these cases, human beings may not know how to behave in situations of uncertainty and see their physical or mental health conditions diminished.
When it comes to unhealthy stress, the goal is to try to get out of the apparent impasse, either by eliminating or reducing the source of emotional discomfort or, if this is not possible, by attenuating the overstimulation generated by the stressful situation. In the first case, the person may try to get away from the source of stress, for example by looking for another job or by staying away from toxic people or situations. And in the second case, when this is not possible, it is a question of adequately re-evaluating the situation and acquiring, as a buffer, useful coping strategies to control the emotional responses associated with the stressful situation.
Thus, the learning relaxation techniques and meditation (such as yoga or mindfulness) and emotion management, engaging in rewarding and distracting activities during leisure time, contact with nature, participation in solidarity movements and the search for family and social support, among Other activities can counteract the discomfort generated by an external situation of discomfort that cannot be avoided. In short, it is either a matter of eliminating unnecessary sources of stress or of raising the threshold of resistance to stress. Fortunately, human beings have a great capacity to adapt to difficult situations and, therefore, everyone has a certain margin of maneuver regarding the vital circumstances in which they are involved.
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