Stress and Your Body

While we have all felt stress at one time or another, and we intuitively understand what stress is, a clear definition of stress is more elusive. Stress can be thought of as a perception that the demands of the situation exceed our abilities to cope.

This means that stress is an individual response. What for one person may be a source of enjoyment, for another it becomes a source of stress.

For example, I know that most people fear public speaking and that it is a source of stress for many people, but I have a friend who relishes the opportunity to take the floor and show how much knowledge they have.

This highlights that stress is an individual response that depends largely on how you view the situation.

If you view the situation in a negative way then this can increase your stress.

For example, lets suppose you that you are about to give a speech, or a student sitting an exam, or an athlete competing at the Olympics. Imagine a situation that may induce some form of stress in you.

As you are sitting, waiting for the event, you have a fleeting thought, or self-doubt, that you may not do so well.

You start to worry!

Whether your worry is realistic or not, to the body this does not matter.

At this point the body is changing in response to that thought. A quick signal is sent to the amygdala part of the brain, which activates the adrenal medulla and secretes stress hormones such as adrenalin.

Without much conscious awareness, your body has started to undergo the 'fight or flight or freeze' response. The heart may start beating quicker, you may notice you have sweaty palms or butterflies in your stomach. The body is preparing to fight or flee.

While this may be a great response in prehistoric times as the caveman escapes from a grizzly bear, for many of the situations that occur in contemporary life, such a response may not be the best for family or work stressors.

While all this is going on in the body, to the real or imagined threat, a slower message arrives at the cerebral cortex part of the brain, which appraises the threatening situation.

If the threat is deemed as real, then a threat message is sent to the amygdala and the stress response increased. On the other hand, if the threat is deemed not real, an all clear signal is sent to the amygdala and the stress response is reduced.

So what we see here is that the stress response is influenced by biological process that is hard wired for our survival, and that the way that we view the situation has important influences on the stress response.

This highlights that stress management skills can work at the physical or the cognitive level, or in other words, by relaxing the body or relaxing the mind. Knowing which works for you is important for you own stress management.

I talk more about the different techniques that are used to reduce stress, and give you practical strategies to manage your stress at this website