Understanding stress

What is stress?

Stress is the combined affect of all those things that that happen in the mind and body in response to the demands of life, from the workplace to relationships, from outside influences or from inner ones, from physical, emotional and mental pressure. Stress, in small doses, is a good thing, but when prolonged and excessive it can be deadly.

In a stressful situation the body is thrown into a high energy state, the so-called ‘fight or flight’ response that enabled our ancestors to escape or tackle the dangers of the natural world. The brain instructs the body to release hormones into the bloodstream that increase your heart rate and provide the body with extra energy, at the same time slowing down the parts of the body not necessary for dealing with the immediate danger or difficulty, such as the digestive, reproductive and immune systems.

Normally the stressful situation would pass and the stress hormones would leave your system, but modern life often means that causes of stress are seemingly ever present. Prolonged stress can cause the body's natural balance to be disturbed, resulting in poor health and physical and mental fatigue. Essentially, stress becomes problematic when it overcomes your coping mechanisms.

Fortunately, there are ways of managing stress to avoid the worst of its negative effects.

Stress hormones

Research shows stress hormones released under times of pressure, as well as making you more alert and ready to ‘fight’, affect parts of the body that control normal functioning, like your immune system, muscles and blood vessels, the digestive system and more.

Stress alerts a tiny region in your brain, called the hypothalamus, to make your adrenal glands near your kidneys release hormones, including adrenaline – which increases your heart rate and blood pressure and boosts energy – and cortisol.

Cortisol is the main stress hormone, which increases sugars in your bloodstream for more energy, sharp thinking and tissue repair. It also slows down functions you don’t need during a fight, like digestion fighting infections.

When you are well, your body decreases hormone levels and lets everything return to normal once a threat has passed. But when the stresses in life are always present these hormones keep circulating, the long term effects of which are not good for your physical health - overexposure to cortisol and adrenaline can damage your organs and put you at increased risk of:

• heart disease
• sleep and digestive problems
• depression
• obesity
• memory loss
• worsening skin conditions, eg, eczema.

What causes stress?

The sources of stress are wide and vary between people, so that what sparks stress in one person may not in another.
Sources of stress can be from the workplace, home or community. Stress may be caused by positive events as well as negative, so that being promoted to a position with more responsibility, getting married or having children can be stressful, though negative causes, such as being fired or getting a divorce, tend to be longer lasting and more difficult to manage.

Some leading causes of stress

Stress can be casued by more than one event

Stress can build up from more than one source and does not need to be linked to a single cause. It's useful to try to identify when something makes you feel stressed (see signs of stress below) and work out what has caused you to feel this way, was it something someone said? A request to undertake more work? Being in a noisy environment? Just feeling overloaded?

Who is susceptible to stress?

Stress can hit anybody during their lifetime. How you react to it, like so much in life, is partly determined by your genes and partly due to your environment or individual experiences of life. 

Inheritance - some people may have genes that lead to overactive or underactive stress responses.

Environment - if you were exposed to very stressful events as a child, like neglect or abuse, you may be particularly vulnerable to stress when you grow up.