Stress
What is Stress? Knowing the Effects of Inner Tension
Author: Ronnie Nijmeh, ACQYR.com
"What is stress?"
Understanding this question is the first step toward developing and using stress management techniques to help you live a happier, more productive life.
At its most basic level, stress is a physical reaction to real or perceived negative events that occur in your life. To answer the question, "what is stress?", we must understand that it is rooted in the "fight or flight" response that enabled out distant ancestors to run away from very real physical danger, or stay and fight whatever was causing the danger.
In those days, the energy created by the fight or flight response was critical to surviving attacks from neighboring tribes and wild animals, as well as escaping severe weather and other events that endangered our ancestors' lives. Essentially it was a burst of energy that literally helped them "fight or flight."
Today, we still have the same fight or flight response. However, since most of us don't encounter very many warring tribes or dangerous animals these days, our minds instead trigger this response when we are standing in line at the grocery store, driving in heavy traffic, and balancing our checkbooks at the end of the month - hardly the kind of "danger" faced by our ancestors, who depended upon the stress response for their very survival.
Unlike people who lived centuries ago, we do not have the physical means to deal with our bodies' response to stress, and that's why we don't experience effective stress relief. Our ancestors were able to burn off the extra energy by running away or fighting the person or thing that caused them to trigger the fight or flight response.
While we don't experience the same dangers as in the past, the same chemicals are still released in our bodies when we perceive danger (even if the danger is non-existent!). The problem is that we do very little running or fighting in response to this heightened level of stress. So essentially, we do not obtain stress relief, because we have no means to burn off the extra chemicals and energy!
How Knowing About Stress Will Help You Live a More Productive Life
Implementing stress management techniques does not have to be difficult. There are many resources available on the Free Stress Articles page that will help you learn how to be more productive while feeling better each day.
Now that you have the answer to the question, "what is stress?" you can begin to implement stress management techniques to help you obtain stress relief in your life. One of the best ways to do this is to work with a personal coach that can learn about the everyday events in your life that cause you stress, and can help you develop personal stress management strategies to help you relieve stress.
You can also begin to experience true stress relief by researching our website for tips and techniques to help you deal with the event in your life that cause you stress every day. For example, one of the best resources for learning how to deal with stress is our article, Top 10 Relaxation Techniques. There, you will learn several stress relaxation techniques that can easily help you relieve stress while handling routine tasks each day.
Another excellent resource is our 10 Ways to Beat Stress article, which will give you some of the most useful tips available to effortlessly implement stress management into each day.
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Published: February 01, 2008
