Learn How Stress At Work Affects Home? And Practical Stress Management Tips

For the past one hundred years there has been much debate and theory offered about what stress is and what stress is not. We each know intuitively what stress is to us because we all experience it. Defining stress, however, is not so easy.

Hans Selye is one of the founding fathers in stress research. In 1956, Mr. Selye argued that stress is not necessarily something 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. Selyes position was that the biochemical effects of stress would be experienced irrespective of whether the situation was positive or negative.

Since that time, much more research has been conducted, and new ideas have evolved. Stress is now widely perceived as a "negative," producing a range of harmful biochemical and long-term effects. These same effects have rarely been observed in positive situations.

Richard S Lazarus is attributed with our most commonly accepted definition of stress: 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.

Everyone responds differently to stressful events. That stress response is part instinct and part to do with how we think. We can train our minds how to best respond to the stressors in our lives. Stress does not need to be all bad. Some stress in our daily lives is good and challenges us to reach even higher heights.

• This website is dedicated to helping people, everywhere, to harness the stress in their lives and channel it into something that is beneficial and positive.

Stress research

Fight-or-Flight Response

In 1932, Walter Cannon offered some of the earliest research on stress and established the theory of the fight-or-flight response. His work proved that when an organism experiences a shock or perceives a threat, it reacts instantly by releasing hormones that help it to survive. In human beings and other animals, these hormones allow for greater speed and strength. Heart rate and blood pressure increases, delivering more oxygen and blood sugar to support major muscles.

Sweating increases to better cool the muscles and allowing them to remain efficient. Blood is regulated to reduce blood loss if there is any damaged. Hormones focus our attention on the threat, to the exclusion of everything else. All of this commands a heightened ability to survive life-threatening events.

We can also trigger this same reaction when faced with something unexpected or something that frustrates our goals. If the threat is small, our response will be likewise, we may not notice the stressor among the many other distractions of a stressful day.

This mobilization of the body to spring into survival mode also has negative consequences. We become excitable, anxious, jumpy and irritable. This state can reduce our ability to be most effective. With shakiness and a pounding heart, we can find it difficult to carry out controlled skills. The intensity of our focus on survival takes from our ability to draw information from many sources. We can find that we are more accident-prone and less able to make good decisions.

To be most productive, our day-by-day lives require a calm, rational, controlled and socially sensitive approach. We need to be able to control our fight-or-flight response; otherwise, we can have problems later on such as poor health and burnout.