Introduction
Identifying and analyzing a concept is a very vital element of hypothesis formulation and through the models built from the analysis. In any kind of a research understanding the topic in question is a fundamental issue. When the concept of topic at hand is not clear the researcher ends up making assumptions and the predicted results will not be relevant to real life. Stress is a very common happening in the society and in the nursing sector they deal with all manner of stress.
Leading life as expected with the presence of stress call for the victim to make changes to their lives. Managing of stress is a complicated thing due to the connivance of life course, daily activities, stress and the way the three intermingle with each other. When one is undergoing stressful moments in life the involvement of this individual in his daily activities normally becomes more stressful. Therefore it calls for the individuals to adapt to the happenings which make it difficult to bear all the events of life at the moment. In view of this nursing workers are highly needed to handle the issues surrounding stress will calls them to have a clear concept on stress for them to be able to intervene.
In nursing stress is a diagnosis which involves rearrangement of the psychological setup therefore it involves the prediction of a way of adjusting to it through the individual’s life. Stress is mostly an imposed element on the developmental changes which implies it has major impact on health. Stress is branded by unmet expectations in the family, work place, health, in friendship, environment and others. The study of stress is mostly linked with health and psychological matters. Chronic and acute stress has been researched on in relation to health impacts but the area of chronic stressors still calls for more study.
In the nursing practice anxiety is at times taken in for stress for the two share symptoms and behavioral changes in response. The two highly resembles. They can be handled and corrected in a clinical setup but they must be differentiated. The characters that distinguish anxiety from stress must be well-known. This analysis will bring out the concept and the characteristics of stress in relation to nursing as diagnosis. It will put effort to analyze the term stress, its use, characteristics and changes and effects over the years.
Literature review
The word stress has been unwrapped in different ways. Stress can be defined as a state in which environmental changes impacts positively or negatively on the physical and psychological forms of a person causing disturbances.
It is seen as responses to threats but mighty not specific. Seyle (1975) described stress in three different stages which include response to the stressor, adaptation and exhaustion when the adaptation fails. The approach which he gives though it may some limitation it brings out stress as an element affected by many factors. Its completion in understanding calls for understanding of other factors. It is actually the result of different operations between the person and the environment. He clearly shows that stress occurs when one careful considers the relationship between the environmental stressors and the person as a threat to his well being.
The extent of stress is determined by the interaction between the resources available to handle the demands of the situation and the demands themselves as the individual perceives them. The ability of an individual to deal with stress is determined by the capability of the person to control and predict the occurrence of a stressful moment or situation. With the help of the transactional model of stress by Lazarus and Folkman (1984) the development of potential stressors is by the environmental and personal factors, which end up in causing stress.
The pressures and the issues that cause stress are known as stressors. This in simple terms can be said to be something that puts extraordinary demands or relatively high demands on an individual. They are therefore both positive and negative events which strain you on the higher side of your ability. The stressors depend more on the perception one has of the event this because what is stressful to one individual is a joy to another. Most of the external and internal causes of stress are self generated. They are created by the individual himself or imposed by the society then they become ingrown in the individual.
Reflecting on the teaching of Selye (1975), stress negative affects health and he established the relationship with the physical stressors. Stress is a situation or condition that’s occurrence is a challenge to a person’s well-being. They situations are categorically the daily hassles, life events and chronic stress. They are well-known to differ in intensity and the duration they last. Life events are things that evidently interrupt and change the usual behaviors. There are the things which have occurred in the recent pasts; this is considered for the recent past affects the current situation of a person. Due to the nature of life events they can only be measured from their onset.
Chronic stress is the long term matters that threaten personal well-being. Financial deprivation and work stress are good examples of chronic stress. It is differentiated from life events by the long duration of time it lasts. One of the short comings of the available literature is the lack of definition of the length of time for an event to quality to be chronic stress. Assumption leads one to believe that the chronic stressors must be really intense though not much has been done to determine the intensity.
Hassles are the normal happenings we encounter daily but they are stressful. They help determined sources of stress i.e., long term and ongoing. Hassles do not vary widely in their intensity but as defined they are interactions with the environment that are of low intensity.
Uses of the concept stress
Stress is activated by a lot of activities and things which differ from one culture and race to another depending on the kind of activities the individuals are exposed to. The stressful events are associated with physical and psychological constraints. Health Problems have resulted from the work conditions that people are exposed to like increased responsibilities and tight demands that people have to meet. Selye (1985) has it that stress is non-specific for it may result from different factors combined.
Some models portray stress as an indication that is likely to cause disruptions in the life of somebody. This particular model brings together internal and external factors and shows their interactions. It therefore bridges the relationship between the individuals and the environment that they interact with on daily basis. It helps us understand that the way in which one appraises the event determines the magnitude of stress. The stressors have different reactions to different persons and have different results to different individuals e.g., some may produce anxiety and others excitements. This kind is a theory brings out the motivational aspect of stress.
Some studies have found that some factors like race, marital status, and sex among others are the causative aspects of the different kinds of stress there is. The different positions held by people in the society which defines their social economic variations affects how people deal with the issues that they face in life. It has been verified that the socio-cultural structures has highly influenced the individual person’s influence of stress.
The society has been found very relevant in putting up the standards of the things which cause stress and the things perceived to be stressful. The same society comes up with the measures to take to avoid or overcome stress. Therefore if the members of the society follow the dictation of the society to the later they are doomed to the failures exhibited by the society (APA, 2010).
Due to this note differences it call for the definition of stress which takes much of the physiological and the cognitive domains be revised to incorporate the social and the cultural aspect to make if more appropriate in this age. In another more precise mode stress illustrates unease emotional experience unto which the body responds physiologically, behavioral and biochemically.
Definition of stress
The term stress has varying definition. The definition of stress is strain and pressure. The dictionary gives many definitions which all depicts a constraining force or influence. The definitions also depict the consequences of the pressures on the victim. Seyle (1975), defined stress as any circumstance that threatens a person’s well-being and therefore the person burdened with the responsibility of coping with it. In His theory he identified the major types of stress as conflict, change, pressure and frustration.
Stress can be said to be any state in one’s life which interferes with the complete equilibrium of the domains of a human being which include the physical, mental and emotional. From the above definition it is clear that most of the times we are under stressful conditions in our lives and we have been able to manage these times. This definition puts us in a dilemma of thinking if there is good and bad stress for lack of equilibrium is normal in our day to day lives.
More precisely, anybody-change which may call for an emotional, physical or mental adjustment or response can be said to be a stress reaction. The aftermaths of stress are anger, anxiety, nervousness or a feeling of frustration. Bad stress involves changes that one has to keep up with when they are out of control while good stress is controlled stimulation. This therefore helps in the growth of an individual in life.
The term Stress has been applied in putting across situations characterized by negative feeling experienced by people. As mentioned earlier not all stress attributed responses are negative for a certain percentage of stress is very crucial for survival. A good example of a crucial stressful moment is during birth all over the world it’s termed as one of the most stressful situation in life. According to Bernard & Krupat (1994), this stress is very important for it prepares the baby for the outside world. Some amount of stress is therefore vital for the survival but extended stress can cause bad effects.
In the heath fraternity stress has been seen as physiological and neurological reactions which give a functionally adaptive service (Franken, 1994). In the recent past the research on stress has been directly related to body reactions towards stress and the cognitive situations which have an effect to the view of stress. Through this series of studies it has come out clearly that different people subjected to the same stressful conditions respond differently to these situations.
According to Levi (1984), stress is the body’s general plan of keeping up with the influences, strains, demands and the changes which it is exposed to socially, mentally and physically. According to this definition the adaptation to external forces which cause discomfort especially caused by the individual’s inability to meet his needs according to the environment at the moment is stress.
Antecedents and consequences
Stress has a psychological focus which lies in its definition as a certain relationship where the interaction of the person with the environment goes beyond the available resources hence endangering the person. The primary baseline shows that the first phase of stress is defined by harm, challenge and the secondary considerations affirms more on the coping means and resources. The impact of stress is moderated by the factors like personality, health affecting lifestyles and some social factors.
The health impairing consequences of stress include poor nutrition, lack of exercise, and smoking which do not help improve the situation. The answer to developing for improvement is responding to stress physiological, emotionally and behaviorally. Stress has also an impact on the psychological functions for example low task performance or none, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and others. Physically it causes a condition referred to as type A behavior immune functioning and cancer.
Measurement issues of stress
Norbeck’s (1984) Life Event Questionnaire is the tool that has been used to determine stress. It’s a checklist of eighty items where the person is to indicate the things that have happened to their lives in the past year as guided by the questionnaire. The items calls for one to indicate good or bad and they are analyzed as of no effect to extreme effect.
The following categories are covered in the items; social matters, personal, school, close friends, health, love, family and others, they therefore handle all the domains of a human life (Sinha, 2008). The linker scale used gives three scores the sum of the negative events, a positive events score and the total score for the events.
Defining attributes
For one to distinguish stress from other concepts related to it, addressing the defining characteristics is very important. Stress can be defined exceptionally by five attributes. The first one is the presence of a feeling of threat or danger. The source of the danger may be known or unknown. This is followed by responses in all aspects like behavioral, psychological and physiological. The presence of the subjective responses is the fourth attribute while adaptation and coping behaviors climax the attributes.
Stress expressed is more defined; the expression prepares the person for the encounter of new stressors of stimuli. Neurophysiologic manifestations of stress are due to the sympathetic stimulation of the nervous system. These results to hormonal reactions and changes for example there is increased release of the adrenal hormone, gastrointestinal activities shoot. The person also sweats more in the palmer and there is dryness in the mouth. Most victims have increased alertness to the source of threat and mostly their concentration is focused on the threat.
Case presentations of the concept stress
The cases that are identified with stress are model case, related case, contrary stress and borderline case.
Model case
A professional woman was sitting alone after working hours in her office in the seventh floor of her workplace trying to finish some papers. Suddenly, this woman heard a fire alarm. She stood up to look through the window to get a grasp of what is happening. The sound of the alarm was irritating to the years. Without knowing what was going on she ran down the stairs instead of using the elevator. Getting to the front door she would not move out for she had left her clocking card in the office. She was sweating extremely and wasn’t composed. Back to the office she ran and sat down composed herself out and slowly put things in order and left.
Related case
A young man left his country to go for further studies in a foreign country. He started feeling symptoms of withdrawal and sleepless nights which he would not relate with anything for he had good company and no hassles for survival. But he explained this as a threat to his well being. There was no specific source that he could not relate it to anything in particular.
Contrary case
A teenager girl who is advised by the mother to avoid wrong company and friend but still she insists on doing it. She got information on maintaining good grades but she despites the good advice of the parents. His colleges in class would talk to her and try to convince her of the dangers of her behavior being such a bright girl in school. Finally some of the friends withdrew from the group after facing some challenges in their lives due to her company. She faced rejection and loneliness. The friends realigned their lives and left her in a miserable state.
Borderline case
This case is about a woman, who was so much fearful and ill at the same time. Have been deceased by her husband lived with her son. At night she used to keep on calling the son due to panic. The son move to another state and the mother kept on calling him at midnight. The son felt so helpless so moved the mother in to a new home with a helper. Though she was nicely treated and taken care of, she continuously lived in anxiety and the health condition did not change in fact it deteriorated.
Invented case
This is mostly out of fanaticizes and dreams. Joy a young daughter of a prominent man in the government was sleeping and at around 2.00 am she dreamt that she was a promotion examination. She could not handle any of the test questions. He started scratching her head and rubbing fingers. She kept on moving on her desk looking at the other students with the expectation they would help.
Conclusion
Therefore in conclusion management of stress begins with the identification of the causative factors which the person strategizes on how to bring them under control. Involving oneself in activities that keep one active is a small thing but has a lot of reward to reap. Some forms of mild anxiety and depression could be treated naturally or without any form of medicine through being active which makes the hormones in the body to be active also. When the level stress has exceeded the normal functioning of the body and taken a prolonged duration of time then it is advisable to seek professional attention before it deteriorates.
Reference List
American Psychological Association (APA). (2010). Stress in America Press Room US: A PA. Web.
Bernard, L. C., & Krupat, E. (1994). Health Psychology: Biopsychosocial Factors in Health and Illness. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
Franken, R.E. (1994). Human Motivation, 3rd ed. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.
Lazarus, R.S. & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal and Coping. Springer, New York.
Norbeck, J. (1984). Modification of recent life event questionnaires for use with female respondents. Research in Nursing and Health, 7, 61-71.
Selye, H. (1975). The Stress of Life, 2nd ed. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Sinha, R. (2008). Chronic Stress, Drug Use, and Vulnerability to Addiction. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1141, pp. 105-130