What Is Stress? |
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Stress is an experience all of us share to a greater or lesser degree. The term 'stress' is very widely encountered in everyday use, and a great deal has been written about it in recent years at a variety of levels, from specialist studies by members of the medical profession, to features in popular weekly magazines.
The stress we usually hear and read about, and indeed experience ourselves as a widespread phenomenon of modern life, is most often the harmful, negative variety. We tend to associate it with disagreeable situations like getting held up in a traffic jam, overworking, or losing a job, and with unpleasant physical manifestations such as headache or even a heart attack.
The good news is that stress has a positive side too. In fact stress is all about energy, and as such can perhaps best be described as a dynamic, stimulating and motivating life-force. Life without it would be unbearably dull and featureless - indeed, in a totally stress-free existence nothing would ever be achieved! Any activity requiring effort creates stress, which can be seen, therefore, as a vital spur and incentive. It is stress in one form or another that literally gets us going - out of bed in the morning; across the road in an alert fashion. Stress motivates us to earn our living and enables us to concentrate in order to do a job efficiently and give our best performance. Another positive aspect of stress is that we can use it as a measure against which to test our reactions to a variety of situations and find out more about ourselves.
Understanding more about stress and how to handle it helps us to learn to make positive decisions and choices, and lead fuller, is more rewarding lives as a result. So it is possible not only to come to terms with harmful stress, by developing a set of stress-skills that are right for you as an individual, but also to harness and channel stress generally to your advantage - an exciting prospect. Obviously, how you choose to approach the stress-handling process is to some extent a very personal matter, but stress patterns and ways to deal with them occur and recur in quite similar areas in all our lives. By concentrating on these, this book sets out to discover how and why stress manifests itself in a variety of shared experiences and situations, and offers as many suggestions as possible for ways in which it can be tackled.
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