Stress and Its Management

1. Stress and
Your Health

2. What is Stress?
- It is a normal and unavoidable part of life.
- It provides the challenge we need to improve
physically, mentally, and emotionally.
- Hans Selye (one of the founding fathers of stress
research) described stress as something that is not
necessarily bad - it all depends on how you take it.
The stress of exhilarating, creative successful work is
beneficial, while that of failure, humiliation or
infection is detrimental.
- Now, the most commonly accepted definition of stress
(mainly attributed to Richard S Lazarus) is that
stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a
person perceives that demands exceed the personal
and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.

3. Types of Instinctive Stress Response
• There are two types of instinctive stress
response that are important to how we
understand stress and stress management:
- the short-term “Fight-or-Flight” response
- the long-term “General Adaptation Syndrome”

4. Fight-or-Flight
• Proposed by Walter Bradford Cannon, it is the instinctive
physiological response to a threatening situation, which
readies one either to resist forcibly or to run away.
• When in Fight-or-Flight response, Our hormones help us to
run faster and fight harder. They increase heart rate and
blood pressure, delivering more oxygen and blood sugar to
power important muscles. They increase sweating in an
effort to cool these muscles, and help them stay efficient.
They divert blood away from the skin to the core of our
bodies, reducing blood loss if we are damaged. And as well
as this, these hormones focus our attention on the threat,
to the exclusion of everything else. All of this significantly
improves our ability to survive life-threatening events.

6. Power, but little control...
• Unfortunately, this mobilization of the body for survival also
has negative consequences. In this state, we are excitable,
anxious, jumpy and irritable. This reduces our ability to work
effectively with other people.
• With trembling and a pounding heart, we can find it difficult to
execute precise, controlled skills. And the intensity of our focus
on survival interferes with our ability to make fine judgments
based on drawing information from many sources. We find
ourselves more accident-prone and less able to make good
decisions.
• It is easy to think that this fight-or-flight, or adrenaline,
response is only triggered by obviously life-threatening danger.
On the contrary, recent research shows that we experience the
fight-or-flight response when simply encountering something
unexpected.

7. The General Adaptation Syndrome
• Hans Selye took a different approach from
Cannon. Starting with the observation that
different diseases and injuries to the body
seemed to cause the same symptoms in patients,
he identified a general response (the “General
Adaptation Syndrome”) with which the body
reacts to a major stimulus. While the Fight-or-
Flight response works in the very short term, the
General Adaptation Syndrome operates in
response to longer-term exposure to causes of
stress.

8. • Selye identified that when pushed to
extremes, animals reacted in three stages:
- First, in the Alarm Phase, they reacted to
the stressor.
- Next, in the Resistance Phase, the
resistance to the stressor increased as the
animal adapted to, and coped with, it. This
phase lasted for as long as the animal could
support this heightened resistance.
- Finally, once resistance was exhausted, the
animal entered the Exhaustion Phase, and
resistance declined substantially.

10. What is a Stressor?
- It is any event, experience, or environmental
stimulus that causes stress in an individual.
- These are factors in life that produce stress.
- These events or experiences are perceived as
threats or challenges to the individual and can be
either physical or psychological.
- It is the source of stress.
- Stressors are more likely to affect an
individual's health when they are "chronic, highly
disruptive, or perceived as uncontrollable”

11. Types of Stressors
An event that triggers the stress response
may include:
• Physical Stressors
• Social Stressors
• Occupational Stressors
• Your Personality
• Biological Changes
• Your Behavior and Life-style

12. Physical Stressors
• These include elements of interior design such
as color, space, and lightning.
• These also include the noise that we hear from
our environment.

14. Social Stressors
• Social stressors are stressors from one’s
relationships with others and from the social
environment in general.

16. Occupational Stressors
• These are stressors involving work.
• Occupational stress arise when people are
presented with work demands and pressures
that are not matched to their knowledge and
abilities and which challenge their ability to
cope.

18. Your Personality
•Our personalities shape how we view a
situation and how we react to it.
• It is largely determined by what we have
experienced and learned in the past.
• If someone experienced failure in a certain
situation in the past, he might experience
stress when facing a similar situation.

20. Biological Changes
• Some normal biological changes that occur during life are also
sources of stress.
• The teen years are a time of a transition from childhood to
adulthood. During these years, your body undergoes rapid and
dramatic changes. There is a profound increase in the production
of hormones, which can affect your mood and emotions.
• Because these normal biological changes are taking place,
adolescence is often an emotional and stressful period of life.
•Hormonal levels also change during the female hormonal cycle.
For example, hormone levels change during the menstrual cycle,
pregnancy, and childbirth. These hormonal changes can physically
and emotionally stressful.

22. Your Behavior and Life-style
• In many ways, personal behavior and life-style can
become sources of physical and emotional stress.
• Failing to plan your time properly can create needless
problems.
• Likewise, lack of regular exercise or sleep puts extra
strain on your body. When you skip or eat meals
irregularly, your energy cycle is constantly interrupted.
Because of these, our body will not function at its best.

24. Social Readjustments Rating Scale
• The effects of life change have been carefully
analyzed by Thomas Homes and Richard Rahe
(1967), who developed a scale to measure the
impact of 43 major life events, called the
Social Readjustments Rating Scale.

25. Adults

26. Non-adults
Score of 300+:
At risk of illness.
Score of 150-
299: Risk of
illness is moderate
(reduced by 30%
from the above
risk).
Score <150:
Only have a slight
risk of illness.

27. How Stress
Affects Your
Health

28. What is Psychosomatic Illness?
• A mental disorder that causes somatic
symptoms.
• A physical disease that is thought to be
caused, or made worse, by mental factor.
• A defect in a body organ is called an
organic disease. But when an organ has no
defect in its structure, but acts up due to
emotional stress, the condition is called a
psychosomatic disease or disorder.

29. Behavioral Effects of Stress
• When under pressure, some people are more
likely to drink heavily or smoke, as a way of
getting immediate chemical relief from stress.
Others may have so much work to do that they
do not exercise or eat properly. They may cut
down on sleep, or may worry so much that they
sleep badly. They may get so carried away with
work and meeting daily pressures that they do
not take time to see the doctor or dentist when
they need to. All of these are likely to harm
health.

30. Stress and Heart disease
• The link between stress and heart disease is well-
established. If stress is intense, and stress hormones
are not ‘used up’ by physical activity, our raised heart
rate and high blood pressure put tension on arteries and
cause damage to them. As the body heals this damage,
artery walls scar and thicken, which can reduce the
supply of blood and oxygen to the heart.
• This is where a fight-or-flight response can become
lethal: Stress hormones accelerate the heart to increase
the blood supply to muscles; however, blood vessels in
the heart may have become so narrow that not enough
blood reaches the heart to meet these demands. This
can cause a heart attack.

31. Other effects of stress
• Stress has been also been found to damage the immune
system, which explains why we catch more colds when
we are stressed. It may intensify symptoms in diseases
that have an autoimmune component, such as
rheumatoid arthritis. It also seems to affect
headaches and irritable bowel syndrome, and there are
now suggestions of links between stress and cancer.
• Stress is also associated with mental health problems
and, in particular, anxiety and depression. Here the
relationship is fairly clear: the negative thinking that is
associated with stress also contributes to these.

33. Stress and
Your
Performance

34. The Positive Effects of Pressure
• Sometimes, however, the pressures and
demands that may cause stress can be
positive in their effect. One example of this
is where sportsmen and women flood their
bodies with fight-or-flight adrenaline to
power an explosive performance. Another
example is where deadlines are used to
motivate people who seem bored or
unmotivated.

35. And the Negative...
• In most work situations jobs, our stress
responses causes our performance to suffer. A
calm, rational, controlled and sensitive approach
is usually called for in dealing with most difficult
problems at work: Our social inter-relationships
are just too complex not to be damaged by an
aggressive approach, while a passive and
withdrawn response to stress means that we can
fail to assert our rights when we should.

36. Managing
Stress: Skills
and
Strategies

37. • You can reduce stress in your life by learning
to manage your time properly. This requires
planning activities before you begin them.
Allow enough time to carry out activities. So
you can avoid a last-minute rush. When you
have many things to do at once, set
priorities. Decide which tasks or activities
are most important and tackle those
activities first.
1. Behavior Strategies

38. •Second, plan a stress-reducing life-style. Try to look
ahead and anticipate major changes in life and plan for
them. When possible, limit the number of changes you
make in your life at any one time. Balance work and play.
Make daily relaxation a priority. Then, plan relaxation
time each day no matter how busy you may be. Practice
positive life-style habit. Get regular exercise, establish
regular meal times, and do not skip meals. Avoid the use
of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs.
• Finally, adopt a positive attitude. Learn to change the
things you can but accept the things you cannot change.

39. • You have a social support system made up of your family
members, friends and others you can talk to. Researchers
have found that people with a good social support system
enjoy better health and live longer than those people who
have few personal ties. Scientists believe that social support
provides a personal buffer against the harmful effects of
stress.
• It is important to use your support system regularly and
share your experiences, good and bad, with those whom you
can talk to and trust.
2. Your Social Support System

40. 3. Relaxation Skills
• Relaxed Breathing. Stress alters natural
breathing patterns. In stressful situations, only the
chest muscles are used to breathe, and breathing
becomes shallow and rapid. For those who
repeatedly experience stress, shallow chest
breathing can become a poor but regular breathing
habit. Most teenagers and adults unconsciously
breathe this way. Learning how to breathe properly
can help you relax and stop the stress response
when it begins.

41. Inhale slowly and deeply with your mouth closed. Expand your stomach so
that your lungs can fill completely with air. Imagine you are trying to bring
the air all the way down to your stomach. Your stomach should rise and
your chest should hardly move at all. Then slowly exhale through the
mouth making an “aaah” sound. Your stomach muscles should contract as
you empty your lungs completely. Practice this exercise for 5 to 10
minutes at a time until you can breathe this way without concentration.
Try using this exercise to calm yourself whenever stress begins to make
you feel anxious. You will be surprised to see how this simple skill can
make you feel better.
• Progressive Relaxation. It is a simple method that reduces body tension
from head to toe. First, sit or lie down in a comfortable position and use
relaxed breathing. As you slowly inhale, tightly tense the muscles in one
part of your body. As you slowly exhale, completely relax the tensed
muscles so they feel limp. Tense and relax the muscles in each part of
your body, progressing from head to toe or from toe to head.

43. The End.. 