CONCEPT PAPER

STRESS

Stress is the combination of a new or possibly threatening situation and your

body’s natural response to it. Stress can be physical, mental, and emotional. Some situations
are stronger stressors than others are. A stressor is anything that trigger as a stress response.
Stress is not new to us because we experience it every time. We’ve been slightly or greatly
disappointed, anxious, angry, frustrated but still, we manage to be realistic and be practical as
possible.

One common effect of long-term stress is fatigue. Physical fatigue can cause
aches and pains all over your body. It also makes you feel extremely tired other long-term
effects of stress include stomachaches, headaches, and changes in appetite. Stress can weaken
your immune system. It may cause high blood pressure or make asthma worse. Mental effects
include confusion and memory problems including also a boredom, lack of concentration,
psychological fatigue, anxiety, and poor decision making, become accident prone. Emotional
effects include sleeplessness, anxiety, and sadness and also depression, anger distrust,
frustration, guilt, crying, irritability, irrational behavior, jealousy. Social effects of stress may
be harmed. If you are sad all the time, your friends may not understand why. If you are
depressed, you may not want to be around anyone else. Severe stress can be dangerous.

In our everyday lives we experience things with our environment. It is a sign that
we are not the sole creature existing in the universe. For instance, teaching may be stressful to
others especially when they are unprepared, nervous or just don’t want to teach but for some
teachers and professors, teaching is a passion, a hobby and a duty. Even happy events such as
promotion from being a teacher to being a principal can be quite stressful. Along with the
promotion are bigger responsibilities, expectations of other people and getting along with
more people. There are also causes of stress that are unpredictable or they are the stressors
that are out of everybody’s controls such as calamities and wars. We are stressed because we
knew that the dangers are very real and it might be a threat to our survival.

We now considered stressors for the most part from outside influences but
sometimes it is us who do our stressors. We create our own problems a part from our outside.
We carry around our irrationality, self-defeating and unreasonable events that is unnecessary
for the stresses of living. Because of these stresses, we tend to cope with it. Coping plays a
very big role in overcoming stress. It makes us tolerate, learn, control and reduce threats that
lead to stress significantly.
 We either cope with it directly or we use defense mechanisms to cope to the
stress. You can’t stop all the stress in your life, but you can management wherein you have
the ability to handle stress in healthy ways. Stress management is a part of mental, emotional,
and physical health.
Two common ways to manage stress are relaxation and redirection. Relaxation is
doing something to take your mind off the problem and to focus on something else that is not
stressful. Relaxing activities include listening to music, reading a book, and going for a walk.
Redirection is taking energy from your stress response and directing it into an activity that is
not stressful. For example, jogging or riding your bike burn off energy caused by stress.
Another way to manage stress is to reframe the stressors. Reframing is looking at the
situation from another point of view and changing your emotional response to the situation.
Reframing often lets you find something positive about the situation. When you reframe a
stressor, you may be reducing the stress cause by seeing the situation only in a negative way.
For example, failing a quiz can be distressful. But if you look at the questions you got
wrong, you can study that material and do better on the final test. Laughter is a natural way to
avoid or relieve stress temporarily. When you are stress, watching a funny movie or being
with people who are laughing and having a good time helps.