Assignment on

STRESS

Submitted by:

QASIM MANSOOR JALALI

MS (Management Sciences)

ID: 4478

Submitted to:

Dr. Ayaz Khan

QURTUBA UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY,

PESHAWAR CAMPUS
What is ‘Stress’?

Stress is a term in psychology and biology, first coined in the 1930s, which has in more recent
decades become a commonplace of popular parlance. It refers to the consequence of the
failure of an organism – human or animal – to respond appropriately to emotional or physical
threats, whether actual or imagined.[1]

Stress symptoms commonly include a state of alarm and adrenaline production, short-term
resistance as a coping mechanism, and exhaustion, as well as irritability, muscular tension,
inability to concentrate and a variety of physiological reactions such as headache and elevated
heart rate.[2]

Origin and terminology

The term stress was first employed in a biological context by the endocrinologist Hans Selye in
the 1930s.[3] He later broadened and popularized the concept to include inappropriate
physiological response to any demand. In his usage stress refers to a condition and stressor to
the stimulus causing it. It covers a wide range of phenomena, from mild irritation to drastic
dysfunction that may cause severe health breakdown.

Signs of stress may be cognitive, emotional, physical or behavioral. Signs include poor
judgment, a general negative outlook, excessive worrying, moodiness, irritability, agitation,
inability to relax, feeling lonely, isolated or depressed, aches and pains, diarrhea or
constipation, nausea, dizziness, chest pain, rapid heartbeat, eating too much or not enough,
sleeping too much or not enough, social withdrawal, procrastination or neglect of
responsibilities, increased alcohol, nicotine or drug consumption, and nervous habits such as
pacing about or nail-biting.

What is stress?

Stress is simply a fact of nature -- forces from the outside world affecting the individual. The
individual responds to stress in ways that affect the individual as well as their environment.
Hence, all living creatures are in a constant interchange with their surroundings (the
ecosystem), both physically and behaviorally. This interplay of forces, or energy, is of course
present in the relationships between all matter in the universe, whether it is living (animate) or
not living (inanimate). However, there are critical differences in how different living creatures
relate to their environment. These differences have far-reaching consequences for survival.
Because of the overabundance of stress in our modern lives, we usually think of stress as a
negative experience, but from a biological point of view, stress can be a neutral, negative, or
positive experience.

In general, stress is related to both external and internal factors. External factors include the
physical environment, including your job, your relationships with others, your home, and all the
situations, challenges, difficulties, and expectations you're confronted with on a daily basis.
Internal factors determine your body's ability to respond to, and deal with, the external stress-
inducing factors. Internal factors which influence your ability to handle stress include your
nutritional status, overall health and fitness levels, emotional well-being, and the amount of
sleep and rest you get.

Stress has driven evolutionary change (the development and natural selection of species over
time). Thus, the species that adapted best to the causes of stress (stressors) have survived and
evolved into the plant and animal kingdoms we now observe. Man is the most adaptive
creature on the planet because of the evolution of the human brain, especially the part called
the neo-cortex. This adaptability is largely due to the changes and stressors that we have faced
and mastered. Therefore, we, unlike other animals, can live in any climate or ecosystem, at
various altitudes, and avoid the danger of predators. Moreover, most recently, we have learned
to live in the air, under the sea, and even in space, where no living creatures that we know of
have ever survived.

Models
General Adaptation Syndrome

Stress is how the body reacts to a stressor, real or imagined, a stimulus that causes stress.
Acute stressors affect an organism in the short term; chronic stressors over the longer term.

Selye researched the effects of stress on rats and other animals by exposing them to unpleasant
or harmful stimuli.[4] He found that all animals display a similar sequence of reactions,
manifesting in three distinct stages. He labeled this universal response to stressors the general
adaptation syndrome or GAS.[5][6]

Alarm is the first stage. When the threat or stressor is identified or realized, the body's stress
response is a state of alarm. During this stage adrenaline will be produced in order to bring
about the fight-or-flight response. There is also some activation of the HPA axis, producing
cortisol.

Resistance is the second stage. If the stressor persists, it becomes necessary to attempt some
means of coping with the stress. Although the body begins to try to adapt to the strains or
demands of the environment, the body cannot keep this up indefinitely, so its resources are
gradually depleted.

Exhaustion is the third and final stage in the GAS model. At this point, all of the body's
resources are eventually depleted and the body is unable to maintain normal function. The
initial autonomic nervous system symptoms may reappear (sweating, raised heart rate etc.). If
stage three is extended, long term damage may result as the capacity of glands, especially the
adrenal gland, and the immune system is exhausted and function is impaired resulting in
decompensation.

The result can manifest itself in obvious illnesses such as ulcers, depression, diabetes, trouble
with the digestive system or even cardiovascular problems, along with other mental illnesses.

Selye: eustress and distress

Selye published in 1975 a model dividing stress into eustress and distress.[7] Where stress
enhances function (physical or mental, such as through strength training or challenging work) it
may be considered eustress. Persistent stress that is not resolved through coping or adaptation,
deemed distress, may lead to anxiety or withdrawal (depression) behavior.

The difference between experiences which result in eustress or distress is determined by the
disparity between an experience (real or imagined), personal expectations, and resources to
cope with the stress. Alarming experiences, either real or imagined, can trigger a stress
response.[8]
Lazarus: cognitive appraisal model

Lazarus [9] argued that in order for a psychosocial situation to be stressful, it must be appraised
as such. He argued that cognitive processes of appraisal are central in determining whether a
situation is potentially threatening, constitutes a harm/loss, a challenge, or is benign.

This primary appraisal is influenced by both person and environmental factors, and triggers the
selection of coping processes. Problem-focused coping is directed at managing the problem,
while emotion-focused coping processes are directed at managing the negative emotions.
Secondary appraisal refers to the evaluation of the resources available to cope with the
problem, and may alter the primary appraisal.

In other words, primary appraisal also includes the perception of how stressful the problem is;
realizing that one has more than or less than adequate resources to deal with the problem
affects the appraisal of stressfulness. Further, coping is flexible in that the individual generally
examines the effectiveness of the coping on the situation; if it is not having the desired effect,
s/he will generally try different strategies.[10]

Neurochemistry and physiology

The neurochemistry of the stress response is now believed to be well understood, although
much remains to be discovered about how the components of this system interact with one
another, in the brain and throughout in the body. In response to a stressor, corticotropin-
releasing hormone (CRH) and arginine-vasopressin (AVP) are secreted into the hypophyseal
portal system and activate neurons of the paraventricular nuclei (PVN) of the hypothalamus.

The locus ceruleus and other noradrenergic cell groups of the adrenal medulla and pons,
collectively known as the LC/NE system, also become active and use brain epinephrine to
execute autonomic and neuroendocrine responses, serving as a global alarm system.[11]

The autonomic nervous system provides the rapid response to stress commonly known as the
fight-or-flight response, engaging the sympathetic nervous system and withdrawing the
parasympathetic nervous system, thereby enacting cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal,
renal, and endocrine changes.[11] The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), a major part of
the neuroendocrine system involving the interactions of the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland,
and the adrenal glands, is also activated by release of CRH and AVP.

This results in release of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) from the pituitary into the
general bloodstream, which results in secretion of cortisol and other glucocorticoids from the
adrenal cortex. The related compound, cortisone, is frequently used as a key anti-inflammatory
component in drugs that treat skin rashes and in nasal sprays that treat asthma and sinusitis.
Recently, scientists realized the brain also uses cortisol to suppress the immune system and
reduce inflammation within the body.[12] These corticoids involve the whole body in the
organism's response to stress and ultimately contribute to the termination of the response via
inhibitory feedback.[11]

Impact on disease

Stress can significantly affect many of the body's immune systems, as can an individual's
perceptions of, and reactions to, stress. The term psychoneuroimmunology is used to describe
the interactions between the mental state, nervous and immune systems, as well as research
on the interconnections of these systems. Immune system changes can create more
vulnerability to infection, and have been observed to increase the potential for an outbreak of
psoriasis for people with that skin disorder.[13]

Chronic stress has also been shown to impair developmental growth in children by lowering the
pituitary gland's production of growth hormone, as in children associated with a home
environment involving serious marital discord, alcoholism, or child abuse.[14]

Studies of female monkeys at Wake Forest University (2009) discovered that individuals
suffering from higher stress have higher levels of visceral fat in their bodies. This suggests a
possible cause-and-effect link between the two, wherein stress promotes the accumulation of
visceral fat, which in turn causes hormonal and metabolic changes that contribute to heart
disease and other health problems.[15]

Common sources
Both negative and positive stressors can lead to stress. Some common categories and examples
of stressors include: sensory input such as pain, bright light, or environmental issues such as a
lack of control over environmental circumstances, such as food, housing, health, freedom, or
mobility.

Social issues can also cause stress, such as struggles with conspecific or difficult individuals and
social defeat, or relationship conflict, deception, or break ups, and major events such as birth
and deaths, marriage, and divorce.

Life experiences such as poverty, unemployment, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder,

heavy drinking [16], or insufficient sleep can also cause stress. Students and workers may face
stress from exams, project deadlines, and group projects.

Adverse experiences during development (e.g. prenatal exposure to maternal stress,[17][18] poor
attachment histories,[19] sexual abuse[20]) are thought to contribute to deficits in the maturity of
an individual's stress response systems. One evaluation of the different stresses in people's lives
is the Holmes and Rahe stress scale.
Stress tests
Measuring stress level independent of differences in people’s personalities has been inherently
difficult. This is due to the fact that some people are able to process many stressors
simultaneously, while others can barely address a few. Such tests as Trier Social Stress Test
attempted to isolate the effects of personalities on ability to handle stress in a laboratory
environment. Other psychologists, however, proposed measuring stress indirectly, through self-
tests. Because the amount of stressors in a person's life often (although not always) correlates
with the amount of stress that person experiences, they combine the results of stress and
burnout self-tests. Stress test helps determine the number of stressors in a person’s life, while
burnout test – the degree to which the person is close to the state of burnout. Combining the
both helps researchers gauge how likely additional stressors in the person’s like to make him or
her experience mental exhaustion. [21]

Adaptation
Responses to stress include adaptation, psychological coping such as stress management,
anxiety, and depression. Over the long term, distress can lead to diminished health and/or
increased propensity to illness; to avoid this, stress must be managed.

Stress management encompasses techniques intended to equip a person with effective coping
mechanisms for dealing with psychological stress, with stress defined as a person's
physiological response to an internal or external stimulus that triggers the fight-or-flight
response. Stress management is effective when a person uses strategies to cope with or alter
stressful situations.

There are several ways of coping with stress, such as controlling the source of stress or learning
to set limits and to say "No" to some demands that bosses or family members may make.

A person's capacity to tolerate the source of stress may be increased by thinking about another
topic such as a hobby, listening to music or spending time in a wilderness.

History and usage

The term stress had none of its contemporary connotations before the 1950s. It is a form of the
Middle English destresse, derived via Old French from the Latin stringere, to draw tight.[22]

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 psychological circles to refer to a mental strain or unwelcome happening, and by advocates
of holistic medicine to refer to a harmful environmental agent that could cause illness. Walter
Cannon used it in 1934 to refer to external factors that disrupted what he called [[homeostasis].
The novel usage arose out of Seyle's 1930s experiments. He started to use the term to refer not
just to the agent but to the state of the organism as it responded and adapted to the
environment. His theories of a universal non-specific stress response attracted great interest
and contention in academic physiology and he undertook extensive research programmes and
publication efforts.[23]

However, while the work attracted continued support from advocates of psychosomatic
medicine, many in experimental physiology concluded that his concepts were too vague and
unmeasurable. During the 1950s Selye turned away from the laboratory to promote his concept
through popular books and lecture tours. He wrote for both non-academic physicians and, in an
international bestseller titled "Stress of Life", for the general public.

A broad biopsychosocial concept of stress and adaptation offered the promise of helping
everyone achieve health and happiness by successfully responding to changing global
challenges and the problems of modern civilization. He coined the term "eustress" for positive
stress, by contrast to distress.

He argued that all people have a natural urge and need to work for their own benefit, a
message that found favor with industrialists and governments.[23] He also coined the term
"stressor" to refer to the causative event or stimulus, as opposed to the resulting state of
stress.

From the late 1960s, Selye's concept started to be taken up by academic psychologists, who
sought to quantify "life stress" by scoring "significant life events", and a large amount of
research was undertaken to examine links between stress and disease of all kinds. By the late
1970s stress had become the medical area of greatest concern to the general population, and
more basic research was called for to better address the issue.

There was renewed laboratory research into the neuroendocrine, molecular and immunological
bases of stress, conceived as a useful heuristic not necessarily tied to Selye's original
hypotheses. By the 1990s, "stress" had become an integral part of modern scientific
understanding in all areas of physiology and human functioning, and one of the great
metaphors of Western life.[23] Focus grew on stress in certain settings, such as workplace stress.
Stress management techniques were developed.

Its psychological uses are frequently metaphorical rather than literal, used as a catch-all for
perceived difficulties in life. It also became a euphemism, a way of referring to problems and
eliciting sympathy without being explicitly confessional, just "stressed out".

It covers a huge range of phenomena from mild irritation to the kind of severe problems that
might result in a real breakdown of health. In popular usage almost any event or situation
between these extremes could be described as stressful.[22]
The most extreme events and reactions may elicit the diagnosis of Posttraumatic stress disorder
(PTSD), an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to one or more terrifying events
that threatened or caused grave physical harm. PTSD is a severe and ongoing emotional
reaction to an extreme psychological trauma; as such, it is often associated with soldiers, police
officers, and other emergency personnel.

This stressor may involve viewing someone's actual death, a threat to the patient's or someone
else's life, serious physical injury, or threat to physical or psychological integrity, overwhelming
usual psychological defenses coping. In some cases it can also be from profound psychological
and emotional trauma, apart from any actual physical harm. Often, however, the two are
combined.

The US military became a key center of stress research, attempting to understand and reduce
combat neurosis and psychiatric casualties.

References
Notes

1. ^ The Stress of Life, Hans Selye, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956.

2. ^ Stress can occur in a variety of forms, including anxiety, a form of stress often accompanied by
additional symptoms and bodily reactions.EHealthMD: What is stress? Retrieved September 3,
2008
3. ^ Hans Selye, History of the Stress Concept. Ch. 2 in Leo Goldberger and Shlomo Breznitz
Handbook of Stress: Theoretical and Clincal Aspects. Free Press, 1982
4. ^ Selye, Hans (1950). "Diseases of adaptation". Wisconsin medical journal 49 (6): 515–6.
PMID 15431657.
5. ^ Selye, Hans (1936). "A syndrome produced by diverse nocuous agents". Nature 138: 32.
doi:10.1038/138032a0.
6. ^ "Selye Biologic Reaction to Stress chart", Chronic Fatigue Unmasked, by Dr. Gerald E.
Poesnecker, February 1999 (ISBN 0916285618)
7. ^ Selye (1975). Confusion and controversy in the stress field. 1. pp. 37–44.
8. ^ Ron de Kloet, E; Joels M. & Holsboer F. (2005). "Stress and the brain: from adaptation to
disease". Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (6): 463–475. doi:10.1038/nrn1683. PMID 15891777.
9. ^ Lazarus, R.S. (1966). Psychological Stress and the Coping Process. New York: McGraw-Hill.
10. ^ Aldwin, Carolyn (2007). Stress, Coping, and Development, Second Edition. New York: The
Guilford Press. ISBN 1572308400.
11. ^ a b c Tsigos, C. & Chrousos, G.P. (2002). Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, neuroendocrine
factors, and stress. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 53, 865-871.
12. ^ National Institute of Health, Harrison Wein, Ph.D., "Stress and Disease: New Perspectives"
13. ^ Treating Stress And Skin Disease In Tandem by Allison Aubrey. Morning Edition, National
Public Radio. 14 September 2009.
14. ^ Powell, Brasel, & Blizzard, 1967.
15. ^ Alice Park (2009-08-08). "Fat-Bellied Monkeys Suggest Why Stress Sucks". Time.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1915237,00.html. Retrieved 2009-08-08.
 16. ^ Glavas MM, Weinberg J (2006). "Stress, Alcohol Consumption, and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-
Adrenal Axis". in Yehuda S, Mostofsky DI. Nutrients, Stress, and Medical Disorders. Totowa, NJ:
Humana Press. pp. 165–183. ISBN 978-1-58829-432-6.
17. ^ Davis et al. (June 2007). Prenatal Exposure to Maternal Depression and Cortisol Influences
Infant Temperament. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, v46 n6
p737.
18. ^ O'Connor, Heron, Golding, Beveridge & Glover. (June 2002). Maternal antenatal anxiety and
children's behavioural/emotional problems at 4 years. Br J Psychiatry. 180:478-9.
19. ^ Schore, Allan (2003). Affect Regulation & the Repair of the Self. New York: W.W. Norton.
ISBN 0393704076.
20. ^ Michael D. DeBellis, George P. Chrousos, Lorah D. Dorn, Lillian Burke, Karin Helmers, Mitchel
A. Kling, Penelope K. Trickett, and Frank W. Putnam. Hypothalamic—Pituitary—Adrenal Axis
Dysregulation in Sexually Abused Girls
21. ^ Truby, William. "Stress Test", Stress Test - self assessment, December, 2009.
22. ^ a b Keil, R.M.K. (2004) Coping and stress: a conceptual analysis Journal of Advanced Nursing,
45(6), 659–665
23. ^ a b c Viner, R. (1999) Putting Stress in Life: Hans Selye and the Making of Stress Theory Social
Studies of Science, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Jun., 1999), pp. 391-410

Bibliography

 Petersen, C., Maier, S.F., Seligman, M.E.P. (1995). Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the
Age of Personal Control. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504467-3
 Seligman, M.E.P. (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. San
Francisco: W.H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-2328-X
 Seligman, M.E.P. (1990). Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf. (Reissue edition, 1998, Free
Press, ISBN 0-671-01911-2).
 Holmes, T.H. and Rahe, R.H. (1967). The social readjustments rating scales. Journal of
Psychosomatic Research 11:213-218.

External links
 Article on "The Use of the Concept of Stress"
 The American Institute of Stress
 University of Massachusetts Medical School Stress Reduction Program
 "Research on Work-Related Stress", European Agency for Safety and Health at Work
(EU-OSHA)
 "Working on Stress", European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA)
 "Taming Stress", Scientific American, September 2003
 Self help guide (NHS Direct)

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Categories: Stress | Endocrine system | Sympathetic nervous system | Anxiety
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