1) Stress refers to both environmental stressors and the physical and emotional reactions they cause. Stressors are events that disrupt one's normal routine, while stress is the response. 2) Hans Selye proposed that the body goes through three stages in response to stressors: alarm reaction, resistance, and exhaustion. In humans, what causes stress depends on one's subjective appraisal of an event. 3) Chronic stress can lead to both mental and physical health problems if the body cannot adapt, including depression, heart disease, obesity, and other issues. As much as 90% of doctor's visits may be for symptoms related to stress.

1. “STRESS”
Professor:
Mrs. Cuevas

2. When you hear the word “STRESS” what
comes to your Mind?

3. The term Stress has been defined in several
different ways. Sometimes the term is applied to
stimuli or events in our environment that make
physical and emotional demands on us, and
sometimes it is applied to our emotional and physical
reactions to such stimuli. In this discussion, we will
refer to the environmental stimuli or events as
stressors and to emotional and physical reactions
as stress.

4. Many sorts of events can be stressors, including disasters
such as hurricanes or tornadoes, major life events such
as divorce or the loss of job, and daily hassles such as
having to wait in line at the supermarket when you need to
be somewhere else in ten minutes. What all these events
have in common is that they interfere with or threaten our
accustomed way of life. When we encounter such
stressors, we must pull together our mental and physical
resources in order to deal with the challenge. How well we
succeed in doing so will determine how serious a toll the
stress will take on our mental and physical well-being.

5. STRESS- an emotional or physical reaction to demanding
events or stimuli.
STRESSORS- an event or stimulus that causes stress.

6. The Canadian physiologist Hans Seyle has been the most influential
researcher and writer on stress. Seyle has proposed that both
humans and other animals react to any stressors in three
stages, collectively known as the general adaption syndrome. The first
stage, when the person or animal first become aware of the
stressors, is the alarm reaction. In this stage, the organism becomes
highly alert and aroused, energized by a burst of epinephrine. After
the alarm reaction comes the stage of resistance, as the organism
tries to adapt to the stressful stimulus or to escape from it. If these
efforts are successful, the stage of the organism returns to normal. If
the organism cannot adapt to continuing stress, however, it enters a
stage of exhaustion or collapse.

7. Seyle developed his model of the general adaption syndrome as a result of
research with rats and other animal. In rats, certain stressors such as
painful tail-pulling, consistently lead to the same sorts of stress reaction. In
humans, however, it is harder to predict what will be stress-ful to a particular
person at a particular time. Whether a particular stimulus will be stressful
depends on the person’s subjective appraisal of that stimulus. How
threatening is it? How well have I handled it this time? For one person, being
called upon to give a talk in front of class is highly stressful stimulus that will
immediately produce such elements of an alarm reaction as a pounding of
heart and a dry mouth. For another person, being called on to give a talk is
not threatening at all, but facing a deadline to complete a term paper is
extremely stressful. In humans, moreover, the specific stress reaction is
likely to vary widely ; some stressful situations give raise predominantly to
emotions of fear, some to anger some to helplessness and depression.

8. The term stress had none of its contemporary connotations
before the 1920s. It is a form of the Middle
English ”destresse”, derived via Old French from
the Latin ”stringere” that means "to draw tight." It had long
been in use in physics to refer to the internal distribution of a
force exerted on a material body, resulting in strain. In the
1920s and 1930s, the term was occasionally being used in
biological and psychological circles to refer to a mental
strain, unwelcome happening, or, more medically, a harmful
environmental agent that could cause illness.

9. Stress is a term that is commonly used today but has become
increasingly difficult to define. It shares, to some extent, common
meanings in both the biological and psychological sciences. Stress
typically describes a negative concept that can have an impact on
one’s mental and physical well-being, but it is unclear what exactly
defines stress and whether or not stress is a cause, an effect, or
the process connecting the two. With organisms as complex as
humans, stress can take on entirely concrete or abstract
meanings with highly subjective qualities, satisfying definitions of
both cause and effect in ways that can be both tangible and
intangible.

11. In science, cognition is a group of mental processes that includes
attention, memory, producing and understanding language, solving
problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines
such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, science and computer science. It
is also used in a branch of social psychology called social cognition to explain
attitudes, attribution and groups dynamics.

12. Emotions are the various bodily feelings associated with
mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation and also with hormones such
as dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin. Emotion is often the driving force behind
motivation, positive or negative. In 1992, Carlson and Hatfield defined emotions, as feeling
states with physiological, cognitive, and behavioral components. The power of emotion is
closely linked to arousal of the nervous system with various states and strengths of
arousal relating, apparently, to particular emotions. Although the word emotion might seem
to be about feeling and not about thinking, cognition is an important aspect of
emotion, particularly the interpretation events. Fear in the mind usually occurs in response
to a threat with the cognition of danger and subsequent arousal of the nervous system.
Emotion is also linked to behavioral tendency.

13. Behavior or behaviour is the range of actions and mannerisms made by
organisms, systems, or artificial entities in conjunction with their
environment, which includes the other systems or organisms around as well as
the physical environment. It is the response of the system or organism to
various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or
subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary.

14. Physicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no
more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things
other than physical things. In contemporary philosophy, physicalism is most
frequently associated with the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind, regarding
which physicalism holds that all that has been ascribed to "mind" is more correctly
ascribed to "brain" or the activity of the brain. Physicalism is also called
"materialism", but the term "physicalism" is preferable because it has evolved with
the physical sciences to incorporate far more sophisticated notions of physicality
than matter, for example wave/particle relationships and non-material forces
produced by particles.

15. Eustress, a type of stress that is fun and exciting, and
keeps us vital
Acute Stress, a very short-term type of stress that can
either be positive (eustress) or more distressing (what
we normally think of when we think of ‘stress'); this is
the type of stress we most often encounter in day-to-
day life (e.g. skiing down said slope or dealing with
road rage)

16. Episodic Acute Stress, where acute stress seems
to run rampant and be a way of life, creating a life
of relative chaos (e.g. the type of stress that coined
the terms ‘drama queen’ and ‘absent-minded
professor’)
Chronic Stress, the type of stress that seems
never-ending and inescapable, like the stress of a
bad marriage or an extremely taxing job (this type
of stress can lead to burnout)

17. When faced with chronic stress and an
overactivated autonomic nervous system, people begin to
see physical symptoms. The first symptoms are relatively
mild, like chronic headaches and increased susceptibility to
colds. With more exposure to chronic
stress, however, more serious health problems may
develop. These stress-influenced conditions include, but are
not limited to:

18. Depression diabetes
hair loss heart disease
Hyperthyroidis mobesity
obsessive-compulsive or anxiety disorder
sexual dysfunction tooth and gum disease
Ulcers cancer (possibly)
In fact, most it’s been estimated that as many as
90% of doctor’s visits are for symptoms that are
at least partially stress-related!

19. THE END