Sources Of Stress I - Modern Stressors

Modern work on stress has gained popular interest because of numerous identifications of environmental stressors. Both daily hassles like commuting and crowding and traumatic experiences such as natural and technological disasters, have been linked with subsequent symptoms of stress. For example, victims of hurricane damage may show increased physical signs of stress months after the crisis has passed.

The irony of human stress response is that it is an effective system for responding to basic stressors, but in response to excessive or incessant demands it can become a source of breakdown and illness.

Primitive Mortal Threats
Primitive stressors could be coped with through normal resistance, the 'fight or flight' behaviour pattern.

The human stress response is a legacy of our primitive human ancestors. The fight or flight response was effective for the three basic mortal threats to primitive human life: starvation, exposure, and attack.

Primitive humans needed the energization of the stress response to gather and secure food to stave off starvation. Thus hungry people feel energized before they become too weakened by hunger to find food.

Primitive humans also needed the energy to find shelter and protection against the elements and weather extremes.

Finally, primitive humans needed a quick fight or flight pattern to respond expediently to the threat of attack from predators or aggressive humans.

Modern Stress
Modern humans living in industrial societies are seldom challenged by these three primitive 'mortal threats'. Modern stress research attributes excessive stress response to our tendency to interpret many events as 'threatening'. Once having interpreted an event as a stressor, we reflexively initiate the stress-response activity of the autonomic nervous system.

Research has identified several kinds of events and experiences to be likely candidates for interpretations as "stressors".

Modern stressors include

• Frustration
• Conflict
• Low-level hassles and pressure
• The behaviour of the Type A personality
• Major life changes, and
• Extreme stressors such as Trauma and Environmental Disaster

Women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting. ~ Ellen Glasgow

How often we turn minor challenges into monumental barriers by giving them undue attention, forgetting that within any problem lies its solution!

However, the center of our focus must be off the problem's tangle if we are to find the solution's thread. The best remedy for this dilemma is the Serenity Prayer.

We cannot change our children, our husbands or partners, not even the best friends who we know love us. But with God's help we can change the attitude that has us blocked at this time.

A changed attitude, easing up on ourselves, lessening our expectations of others, will open the door to the kind of relationships we seek, the smooth flowing days we long for.

We need not take life so seriously. In fact, we shouldn't take it so seriously. We can measure our emotional health by how heartily we laugh with others and at ourselves.

The 24 hours stretching before us at this time promises many choices in attitude. We can worry, be mad, depressed, or frustrated, or we can trust our higher power to see us through whatever the situation.

So, we can relax.

It is our decision, the one decision over which we are not powerless.