What Is Psychological Stress?

Stress is a complicated term to define. It's simplest definition might be that it is an event or situation that forces a man to adapt to the event. Stress is the event itself and the reaction to that event within the man experiencing it. Thus stress is completely subjective. What may be stressful to one man might be pleasant or fun to another. Flying, for example, can cause some citizen to form anxieties and panic attacks while others love to fly and look transmit to the flight. What is more, everyone's body responds in the same way to a stressful event, or any event for that matter, but the citizen that suffer from stress related illness and problems find it hard to turn their body's response off.

Psychological stress is more to do with the turning off of the body's stress responses to a situation.

The body's stress response is to increase the flow of hormones adrenaline and cortisol in the bloodstream. This has the sway of raising the heart rate, redirecting blood from the extremities and stomach to the vital organs, changing the consistency of the blood for inherent injury and making our senses more aware.

You could liken this to the charge in a battery. The body charges itself up to a high voltage ready for discharge. In the analogy of the battery, if we were to keep on charging the battery without a opening for it to discharge it would ultimately explode. If our body's continue to be flooded with adrenaline and our heart rate is constantly high we will form health problems which could be fatal.

Psychological stress may have evolved from a real event that caused an emotional disturbance in the past. This event may have been the messy splitting up from a relationship that lead to emotional pain. As the event recedes into the past other sentiments within the persons psyche tend to cause anxiety and stress. So the man might feel unattractive to the opposite sex or lose trust in socialising with people. These issues will cause stress for the man and can lead to other behaviours that induce stress. They may find it hard to stay focussed or feel that their personality is disintegrating or get anxiety attacks.

All these issues are, effectively, in the mind of the person. They will cause the body to react as if it was under some form of stress when in fact it is not. If this continues for any distance of time the man could suffer from ill-health.

Through counselling the man can understand that these issues are not important because there is nothing that the man can do to turn the event. Counselling can help citizen to accept the preliminary stressful event and rationalise the subsequent stress inducing thoughts. The biggest qoute with psychological stress any way is that the mean man cannot recognize psychological stress let alone trace it back to a source. This is why some form of counselling or group sessions can help but many citizen are reluctant to do this because they feel uncomfortable admitting something is wrong.