What Is Stress?
Most people look at stress as being something unpleasant and for which we need to seek relief, but many psychologists view stress as being beneficial and this is more than a little confusing.
Stress can be both good and bad and, often, it is merely a matter of how we view ourselves in terms of both our mental and physical states. If you’re still confused then here is an example:
Picture two people – one a runner about to compete in his first Olympic final and the other a college student who is just about to sit his final engineering examination. The runner has spent many years training for the Olympic Games but the college student has neglected his studies and done very little work.
If we look at both in purely physiological terms they are about to experience similar effects – increased breathing and heartbeat, a raised metabolism, increasingly active sweat glands and so on. In psychologically terms they are also about to experience similar effects – increased concentration on the present moment and thoughts about the coming minutes, strong images and heightened feelings.
In psychological terms however there are also some significant differences. The runner is excited, ready for the challenge and keen to show his ability and to win the race. The college student by contrast has very considerable doubts about his ability and is feeling more than a little fear.
These two young men are under stress and are feeling stressful, but the differences in their stress are important. The runner sees his situation as presenting him with a challenge which he feels that he is ready for and which he wants to take on. The college student knows that he is ill prepared for his examination and views his likely failure as presenting him with a poor grade, which will probably mean that he has to re-take his final year.
Despite the fact that both young men are unsure about the outcome, they each evaluate their chances of success quite differently. They will almost certainly also view failure quite differently too.
The runner might end up with a silver medal rather than a gold medal. He would almost certainly be disappointed by this result but, in the Olympic Games, coming second can still lead to some lucrative endorsements and a very promising future. The college student will probably see his chance of getting into a good graduate school as being pretty poor and will be thinking only in terms of needing to retake the year before he can even graduate.
This is a very simplified example of the different ways in which stress can affect us, but the pattern which we see here is nonetheless typical. Whether you end up feeling elated or stressed is frequently a question of both how you view the situation around you and your own inner state of mind.
On the one hand, stress can merely refer to a condition of heightened awareness which is combined with several physiological symptoms. On the other hand, it can refer to the same condition with an added an element of worry. It is this second form of stress that we are usually looking at when we talk of being stressed.
