قم بتحميل هذا المقال بالعربية (PDF)*This article in ArabicIt is a common misconception that life should be always happy. In fact, life is frequently a roller coaster of different situations that might make people feel elated and happy, calm and content, worried, anxious or angry.
Every act of learning automatically includes an element of stress, because we learn only when we are confronted with something new.
Nature has endowed us with these different feelings; they can be sometimes modified by experiences. Their seat is in the limbic system, the part of our brain that we share with our animal brothers and sisters. In stressful situations, the limbic system becomes more powerful than the frontal cortex, which is the seat of our conscious thinking. If we had to contemplate how to react in threatening situations, we could be dead (in principle) until we have finished our thought processes.
It serves, therefore, our survival, if, particularly in stressful situations, we are reigned by our emotions. Depending on our spontaneous, subconscious, evaluation of our chances to gain control of the stressful situation, we react with the fight- or flight response, or the freeze response.
The fight- or flight response is a result of the activation of the sympathetic nervous system. The adrenal glands produce more of the stress hormones adrenalin and cortisol and release them into the blood stream. These hormones accelerate our heart beat and breathing rate, and lead to higher blood pressure, with the purpose of getting more blood to the big muscles, so we can attack or escape. Our muscles get more tense, and our alertness increases.
In a situation where we feel, however, helpless or trapped, our parasympathetic nervous system gets activated and stimulates the production of opioids in our body, which numbs us and leads to an altered perception of reality. Our heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate go down, and our muscle tone decreases. Our alertness decreases, too.
We are very well able to recover from a single stressful incident, but our body and mind is at high risk to suffer if stress becomes chronic, and/or many stressful life events accumulate, thus adding up to the experiences of unbearable stress.
Chronic or accumulated stress is the reason for many psychosomatic ailments, like heart, blood pressure, breathing, and sleeping problems, back and neck pains, headaches, stomach problems, irritable bowel syndrome, and skin rashes.
We cannot concentrate nor learn anything new (which is unrelated to the current nature of the stressors). We sometimes feel that we have lost our intellectual capacities.
We lose our capacity to feel with others, our empathy, because under stress we have to give priority to our own survival. Therefore, relationships problems are likely to increase.
We are at a high risk to slip into anxieties, depression, or to become more irritable and angry. People with pre-existing mental health problems are at a high risk that their problems become more aggravated.
Because human beings are a bio-psycho-social unity, we have three areas which we can use to help ourselves to control, or at least lessen, our stress reactions:
On the physical level: we can use movement, relaxation, or tremoring to get the stress out of our body;
On the psychological level: we can use cognitive or emotional strategies to make ourselves less stressed;
On the social level: We can receive or give social support, by sharing information, assisting each other practically, and trying to understand each other.
The next article will take a closer look at these strategies of self-help.