Not all pressure or pressure is stressful, but any type of pressure or pressure that is involved in the stress spectrum will have a negative impact on physical, mental and emotional health.
This condition, which registers an undoubted progression worldwide, shows not only that anyone can suffer from it regardless of age, gender or economic condition, but also that regardless of how hectic this particular time may be, many respond or have always responded in a stressed way to the demands of life, since stress comes before anything a response of the body to what it perceives as an inevitable and compelling demand.
Just as it is not necessary to have experienced a trauma to respond with post-traumatic stress, it is not necessary for one’s life to be in danger to develop fight or flight responses, nor is it necessary to participate in real dangers for the body to release hormones and alter blood pressure. , your heart rate and your breathing rate; all of them bodily changes associated with stress and alertness. Enough to suffer from stress with developing a poor adaptation to the social environment, a development that also tends to worsen over time.
But what it actually means to adapt poorly to the environment, we would have to fully understand this through a global view that includes the physical, mental and emotional aspects simultaneously, so that we could locate the causes of stress on the basis where it is generated.
Let us dedicate ourselves here today to thinking about common stress (let us leave for another time the so-called: post-traumatic stress that requires a specific approach and totally distinguished from this), let us delve into the stress that does not seem to have had a specific cause, but is equally the cause of real organic alterations and care, and let’s start thinking about it as something more than a mere continuous physiological reaction caused by difficult situations, with the first objective of conceiving ourselves now as active subjects with the potential to overcome it.
Immersed in the current times, it is not very difficult to end up stressed. The large amount of stimuli that the new links of communication drop on us, which sometimes seem to invalidate any distance, can be producers of confusion and complexity, undoubtedly contributing to the generation of stress that without warning and stealthily supplants the correct form of assimilation. of any stimulus. Stress assumes situations of who live in a constant and ignored state of shock that, a state that ruins the correct constitution of the meaning of experiences necessary for the conscious orientation of behavior.
Types of stress
Stress can be acute, episodic or chronic.
When it is acute it has arisen from the constraint of a recent past as much as from the anticipated demands of the near future.
It is episodic when it is acute and is also frequent, and given that in this case the repetition of its episodes draws attention, the underlying organization of life itself is also notable, which is surely precarious or none at all. Episodic stress leaves us character sediments from which irritability, bad mood and the feeling of helplessness come.
When stress is chronic It is because it has also already become a state of permanent wakefulness, an ignored way of living in constant apprehension, also naturalized, as if living in constant alarm were the way one should live. Chronic stress also leaves its embers, which later turn into depressive moods. It is clear that if one believes that living is that, it is not strange that the idea of the absence of meaning in existence begins to gain ground.
Stress has 3 phases: alarm, resistance and exhaustion.
1. Alarm
In this phase the body prepares to flee, producing the maximum possible energy necessary to face a thorny scenario. The physiological correlate is recorded in the activation of hormone secretion through a chain reaction that causes different reactions in the body such as muscle tension, sudden sharpening of the senses, increased heart rate and high blood pressure. among other symptoms.
2. Resistance
In this phase, the one who is stressed is in a state of alert for a long time without participating in any relaxation and although his body tries to return to its normal state, does not stop producing physiological stress responses a fact that keeps your hormones on determined alert.
3. Exhaustion
The stress has already become chronic so it lasts for a long period of time. The activation, tension, stimuli and stressful demands did not decrease, so the previous level of resistance ended up being exhausted, causing the alarm to reappear, but in a much more unstable state of the body than before. Both physical and psychological problems become evident, so in this phase the feeling of helplessness, frustration and weakness increases, restorative sleep is not achieved and anguish and the radical need to escape occur.
It goes without saying that an organism threatened by such conditions is totally altered by the activation of the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, adrenal glands, among other issues.
Live without stress
But, if the mere fact of living means assuming different types of demands, and if the world in which we are immersed – being increasingly stimulating – means permanently expanding our capacity to adapt, how would it be possible to live without stress?
Let’s remember what we said at the beginning: stress is above all a way of responding to what is perceived as an inevitable and compelling demand.
Two factors are extremely important here: time and form. The time that matters is subjective and the way is that with which we assume the demands of life.
If these demands of life are perceived as pressing demands, it is because the “correct form of assimilation” of everything that requires adaptation from us is not established, be they: mere stimuli, concrete requests or ambiguous demands.
This “correct way” implies a stable underlying organization, something like a unique logistics for living, which must be able to be exercised as a “forceful and functional lifestyle” applicable to a changing and hyperstimulating world in which we live.
And if we achieve such a lifestyle, we will surely have a contingency plan that will respond effectively to the unexpected.
The problem of stress is summarized in that when we do not correctly assimilate the stimuli or pressures these tend to become invasive with the power to ruin the constellation in which that sense – always singular – by which we live our lives is sustained, a fact that directly impacts the temperament, which is what ultimately tunes our body to live in harmony. necessary.
