Survival Stress!!! You may have heard the phrase “fight or flight” before. This is a common response to danger in all people and animals…

 What is stress 

• Stress is your body’s way of responding to any kind of demand. 
• It can be caused by both good and bad experiences. 
• When people feel stressed by something going on around them, their bodies react by releasing chemicals into the blood. 
• These chemicals give people more energy and strength, which can be a good thing if their stress is caused by physical danger. 
• But this can also be a bad thing, if their stress is in response to something emotional and there is no outlet for this extra energy and strength.

What cause of stress

• Many different things can cause stress. 
• From physical (such as fear of something dangerous) to emotional (such as worry over your family or job) – these often referred as “stressors.” 

Some of the most common sources of stress are: 

Survival Stress – You may have heard the phrase “fight or flight” before. This is a common response to danger in all people and animals. When you are afraid that someone or something may physically hurt you, your body naturally responds with a burst of energy so that you will be better able to survive the dangerous situation (fight) or escape it all together (flight). This is survival stress. 

Internal Stress – Have you ever caught yourself worrying about things you can do nothing about or worrying for no reason at all? This is internal stress and it is one of the most important kinds of stress to understand and manage. Internal stress is when people make themselves stressed. This often happens when we worry about things we can’t control or put ourselves in situations we know will cause us stress. Some people become addicted to the kind of hurried, tense, lifestyle that results from being under stress. They even look for stressful situations and feel stress about things that aren’t stressful. 

Environmental Stress. This is a response to things around you that cause stress, such as noise, crowding, and pressure from work or family. Identifying these environmental stresses and learning to avoid them or deal with them will help lower your stress level. 

Fatigue and Overwork. This kind of stress builds up over a long time and can take a hard toll on your body. It can be caused by working too much or too hard at your job(s), school, or home. It can also be caused by not knowing how to manage your time well or how to take time out for rest and relaxation. 

Good stress vs Bad stress

So if stress can be so bad for you, how can there be “good” or “positive” stress? 

If you are suffering from extreme stress or long-term stress, your body will eventually wear itself down. But sometimes, small amounts of stress can actually be good. 

Understanding your stress level is important. If nothing in your life causes you any stress or excitement, you may become bored or may not be living up to your potential. If everything in your life, or large portions of your life, cause you stress, you may experience health or mental problems that will make your behavior worse.

Understanding the illness link about the stress:

• Neurobiological perspectives: 
  • The body pays a price if must constantly adapt to stress. 
  • This ‘price’ can be expressed in terms of what is referred to as allostatic load – (allostatic (or allotasis) – is the process of achieving stability, or homeostasis, through physiological or behavioral change). 
  • If the body is exposed to high levels of stress hormones such as cortisol and becomes susceptible to disease because of altered immune system functioning – a high allostatic load.

•  Psychodynamic perspectives: 
  • Franz Alexander (1950) – repressed emotional impulses created a chronic negative emotional state that impacted health, thus setting the stage for problems like ulcers, asthma, or essential hypertension.

•  Cognitive and personality perspectives: 
  • Physical threats obviously create stress – so do negative emotions such as resentment, regret, and worry. 
  • Negative emotions stimulate sympathetic nervous system activity and may keep the body’s stress systems aroused and the body in a continual state of emergency, sometimes for far longer than it can bear, as suggested by the notion of allostatic load. 
  • Personality traits have been linked to immune system functioning – e.g. negative emotions linked to slow antibody production. 

Physical and mental signs of short-term stress

Often occurring in quick ‘bursts’ in reaction to something in your environment, short-term stress can affect your body in many ways. Some examples are: 

• Making your heartbeat and breath faster
• Making you sweat more
• Leaving you with cold hands, feet, or skin
• Making you feel sick to your stomach
• Tightening your muscles or making you feel tense
• Leaving your mouth dry
• Making you have to go to the bathroom frequently
• •Increasing muscle spasms, headaches, fatigue, and shortness of
  breath. 

While this burst of energy may help you in physical situations where your body needs to react quickly, it can have bad effects on your mind and performance if there is no outlet or reason for your stress. These effects may include: 

• Interfering with your judgment and causing you to make bad decisions
• Making you see difficult situations as threatening
• Reducing your enjoyment and making you feel bad
• Making it difficult for you to concentrate or to deal with distraction
• Leaving you anxious, frustrated or mad
• Making you feel rejected, unable to laugh, afraid of free time, unable to work, and not willing to discuss your problems with others. 

Physical and mental signs of short-term stress

Long-term stress or stress that is occurring over long periods of time can have an even greater effect on your body and mind. Long-term stress may affect your body by: 

• Changing your appetite (making you eat either less or more)
• Changing your sleep habits (either causing you to sleep too much or not letting you sleep enough)
•  Encouraging ‘nervous’ behavior such as twitching, fiddling, talking too much, nail biting, teeth grinding, pacing, and other repetitive habits
• Causing you to catch colds or the flu more often and causing other illnesses such as asthma, headaches, stomach problems, skin problems, and other aches and pains
• Affecting your sex life and performance
• Making you feel constantly tired and worn out. 

Long-term stress can also have serious effects on your mental health and behavior: 

• Worrying and feeling anxious (which can sometimes lead to anxiety disorder and panic attacks) 
• Feeling out of control, overwhelmed, confused, and/or unable to make decisions
• Experiencing mood changes such as depression, frustration, anger, helplessness, irritability, defensiveness, irrationality, overreaction, or impatience and restlessness
• Increasing dependence on food, cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs
• Neglecting important things in life such as work, school, and even personal appearance
• Developing irrational fears of things such as physical illnesses, natural disasters like thunderstorms and earthquakes, and even being terrified of ordinary situations like heights or small spaces.  

Stress Management

Relaxation training – the most common form of relaxation training is progressive muscle relaxation, which involves systematically tensing and then relaxing each major muscle group in the body. 

Cognitive restructuring – includes approaches to alter people’s belief systems and reduce the negativity of their interpretations of
experience. 

Behavioral skills training – practice in skills such as time management and effective prioritizing. 

Abnormal Breathing Technique

Breathing exercises such as this one should be done twice a day or whenever you find your mind dwelling on upsetting thoughts or when you are experiencing pain: 

• Place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. When you take a deep breath in, the hand on the abdomen should rise higher than the one on the chest. This insures that the diaphragm is pulling air into the bases of the lungs. 
• After exhaling through the mouth, take a slow deep breath in through your nose imagining that you are sucking in all the air in the room and hold it for a count of 7 (or as long as you are able, not exceeding 7). 
• Slowly exhale through your mouth for a count of 8. As all the air is released with relaxation, gently contract your abdominal muscles to completely evacuate the remaining air from the lungs. It is important to remember that we deepen respiration not by inhaling more air but through completely exhaling it. 
• Repeat the cycle four more times for a total of 5 deep breaths and try to breathe at a rate of one breath every 10 seconds (or 6 breaths per minute). At this rate our heart rate variability increases which has a positive effect on cardiac health.