Stress and Health

Psychology
Andrew Arnold
March 25, 2010

Ever wonder about how stress affects our bodies and our health? This word stress is thrown around by the media so much it’s losing its meaning but have you ever wondered how they define stress? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines stress as a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation. Our text book defines stress as the term used to describe the physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses to events that are appraised as threatening or challenging. Stress-causing events are called stressors, they can come from external sources or from within us and can scale from relatively mild to
Our text book compares major stressors to throwing a rock into a pond. The rock makes a big splash, like a major life stressor, but the rock disappears. What’s left is the ripple and those ripples are the hassles that arise from that big stressor. There are some psychological and mental factors involved being with stress. When stress comes to mind what does the typical person think of? People think about the pressure involved with stress. We as people stress about everything from work to family life to timing pressure. Time pressure is one of the most common forms of pressure. It seems like especially in today’s society, everyone has this “I have no time” concept. This no time concept is called the poverty of time concept. People believe they have no time because they occupy themselves with something else of a lower priority such as, watching television or playing around on the computer and they could be thinking and doing what’s most important. When people say they have no time to do whatever, their next breath is usually always “but I work well under pressure.” The truth is, according to government studies, that pressure can actually have a negative effect impact on a person’s ability to be creative. Another psychological factor involved with stress is the uncontrollability factor. This is the person’s ability to have some kind of dominance or control over a particular event or