The contemporary fast speed of life is largely associated with a big amount of stress experienced by people in everyday life. Stress can be defined as the brain’s response to any situation forcing the person to feel too much mental or emotional pressure (Hellhammer and Hellhammer 14). It is the way our body responds to any demand or threat. Understanding the diverse nature of the causes of the stress is crucial to the effective elimination of its effects, as these two factors heavily depend on each other.
The causes of stress have various origins and are highly diverse. Though stress is strongly associated with negative events, its causes can include positive experience. The main components of stress, change and pressure, can be associated both with good and bad events and, therefore, there are both negative and positive causes of stress (Aldwin 56). A person experiences significant stress both in the situation of loss of close relative and birth of a child. Besides, stressors can be classified to those that are related to everyday events (micro-stressors), those that are connected to major life events, and those that have an ambient nature.
Micro stressors include personal problems, job issues, social interaction, and other minor events happening in the life of every person on a daily basis (“Stress Management – Causes of Stress” par. 2). The causes related to major life events include marriage, graduation from college, loss of parents, etc. The ambient stressors include the external conditions that have a negative value and constitute a part of our environment, e.g. pollution or traffic jams. Severe natural disasters, such as hurricanes, and social crisis, such as wars, can be unified into a separate group of stressors (Whealin, DeCarvalho, and Vega 6; Wilson and Raphael 936).
The effects of stress include both biological and psychological manifestations. The scope of effects largely depends on the causes and the nature of stress. A person attacked by a homeless dog experience a release of hormones and chemicals associated with stress, which are aimed at making the body ensure the survival. The effects of such stress are short-term and fade after the stressor is eliminated. However, a person that is going through a divorce experience a chronic stress, which has long-term negative effects on his/her body, including problems with digestion, immune system, reproduction, etc. (“Q&A on Stress for Adults” par. 4).
Psychological effects of stress also heavily depend on its nature. A person that experiences stress after becoming a father often faces mild effects of stress, such as over excitation while a person experiencing stress after the death of a parent is more likely to have severe psychological effects, such as insomnia and hysteria, which can lead to depression or other post-traumatic problems. The effects of the stress caused by traumatic life events, natural disasters, or social crisis, can fade after a period, but certain consequences will still be likely to appear, including nightmares, panic attacks, phobia, etc.
The analysis of both causes and effects of stress reveals that these two aspects are closely interrelated. The effective prevention of stress is possible only if the person is aware of the effects of stress caused by a certain condition. For example, only after discovering the risks related to constant pressure put by enormous loads of work, the person is likely to search for a solution able to remove such permanent cause of stress. Besides, effective treatment is impossible without exploring the initial causes of the stress. For example, treating such effects of stress as panic attacks cannot be successful until the traumatic event that caused such consequences is discovered. Being aware of potential causes of the stress and understanding its effects are essential to the prevention of severe stressful situations and dealing with the consequences of prior stressful experience.
Various causes lead to stress, and diverse consequences are related to it. Understanding the causes and effects of stress is crucial both for preventive activities and elimination of negative effects of the phenomenon.
Works Cited
Aldwin, Carolyn. Stress, Coping, and Development. 2nd ed. 2007. New York: The Guilford Press. Print.
Hellhammer, Dirk, and Juliane Hellhammer. Stress: The Brain-Body Connection, Basel, Switzerland: Karger, 2008. Print.
Q&A on Stress for Adults: How It Affects Your Health and what You Can Do about It. n.d. Web.
Stress Management – Causes of Stress. 2014. Web.
Whealin, Julia, Lorie DeCarvalho, and Edward Vega. Strategies for Managing Stress After War, Hoboken, New Jersey: Kohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008. Print.
Wilson, John, and Beverley Raphael. International Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes, New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2013. Print.