Stress Management

What is stress?
Every person has experienced stress in some form or other and many writers have defined stress in different ways. Some definitions have gained recognition while others are still been passionately debated, avidly argued and aggressively defended. Stress, if not managed effectively, can cause serious health problems, even death. Self-medication in such situations is never advisable. Only qualified health professionals should treat stress-related illnesses.

What happens to the body in stressful conditions?
Walter Cannon (1932) conducted researches on stress and came up with his theory of "fight-or-flight" response. He found out that when an organism comes in a situation that it cannot comprehend, at that time either the organism fights or runs away. This is so because the organism in the perception of threat, releases such hormones that enable it to survive either by fighting or by fleeing.

In humans, these hormones enable the heart to pump faster, thereby delivering more blood to the body and more oxygen to the body parts. The heart rate and blood pressure increases as it flows much faster delivering sugar and oxygen to important muscles. The sweat glands produce more sweat in an effort to cool down these muscles thereby increasing their efficiency. The blood is diverted from the skin to the core of the body in an effort to minimize blood loss if wounded. The hormones enable the mind to concentrate only on the object of threat so that the individual can exclusively deal with it. All these biochemical actions and reactions take place in direct proportion to the perceived threat, some shock, something unexpected, or something that frustrates. If the threat is small, the response is small, and likewise, if the threat is large the response is large. These biochemical hormones enable the individual to survive stressful conditions.