Health & Stress

In medicine, stress is defined as one of the following: more...

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• An applied force or system of forces that tends to strain or deform a body,
• The resisting force set up in a body as a result of an externally applied force, or
• A physical or psychological stimulus that can produce mental tension or physiological reactions that may lead to illness.

Stress may also be defined as \"the sum of physical and mental responses to an unacceptable disparity between real or imagined personal experience and personal expectations.\" By this definition, one may appreciate that stress is a response which includes both physical and mental components. The physical responses include a host of physiological changes which largely fall into acute response, and chronic response. Acute response is approximately that discussed by Hans Selye. Chronic response is more complex and subtle, and has not been fully delineated. Selye presented his concepts in the General Adaption Syndrome, where the organism used diverse mechanisms to Adapt to Stressors and return to a Homeostatic state (Claude Bernard, Walter Cannon). Later in his career, he proposed two levels of stress resistance: a superficial which could be replenished, and a deep which could not. Mental responses to stress include adaptive (\"good\") stress, anxiety, and depression. Where stress enhances function (physical or mental) it may be considered \"good\" stress. However, if stress persists and is of \"excessive\" degree, it eventually leads to a need for resolution, which may lead either to anxiety (escape) or depressive (withdrawal) behaviors—these observation could add immensely to philosophy, religion, ethics, and law, but it would stress those systems to adapt to this knowledge, and the outcome is doubtful. One may further appreciate from that definition that stress may derive from imagined experience such as stress felt during a frightening movie). Further, the fulcrum of stress response is the presence of disparity between experience (real or imagined) and personal expectations. A person living in a fashion consistent with personally-accepted expectations has no stress even if the conditions might be interpreted as adverse from some outside perspective—rural people may live in comparative poverty, and yet be unstressed if there is sufficiency according to their expectations. Finally, where there is chronic disparity between experience and expectations stress may be relieved by acceptance. However, since acceptance is rarely complete—except in children—stress resolution by this approach is also rarely complete. It has been said that stress is often a reaction to a crisis of predictability, further that mind is solely an instrument of prediction, and that the body may be divided into a vegetative process and an integrative process.

Read more at Wikipedia.org