What Stress Is Really, And How Is It Connected To Your Mental Health?
Share
Did you know a peculiar thing about your body? Your body reacts to stress in various ways to protect you from threats. Everyone has a few daily demands they have to meet, like paying the bills, taking care of the family, and working. Your body activates your fight-flight-freeze response if it treats these demands as threats.
So there is a very high possibility you must have felt stressed. While it isn’t always bad, too much stress can affect your well-being easily. Read this blog till the end to decipher how stress and your mental health are connected!
What Is Stress?
Stress, in easy terms, is how you react when you feel you are under pressure or threatened. It happens when you do not have control or cannot manage a specific situation. Here are a few examples:
- Managing too many responsibilities at work
- Taking care of your finances
- Dealing with unfair treatment at the workplace
- Managing long-term health issues
- Grieving the loss of a close one
- Changing your job
Positive and negative moments in your life can be stressful. But you can feel stressed the most when there are changes in your routines. The amount of stress you get depends on how you react towards an event or a situation. Hence, every event or situation causes different people to stress differently.
Types of Stress
There are two main types of stress:
- Acute stress
- Chronic stress
Criteria of difference |
Acute Stress |
Chronic Stress |
How long does it last? |
It lasts a short period, from a few minutes to a few hours only. |
It lasts for a long time or makes its way back to you. |
When do you face this type of stress? |
Acute stress happens when you face an event or a situation that’s upsetting or unexpected. |
You are likely to experience this if you are under a lot of pressure a lot of times. |
What Are The Most Common Signs of Stress?
Here are a few most common signs of stress that can help you differentiate when you are stressed:
- Muscles feel tense
- Increase in heart rate and breathing
- Difficulty in sleeping
- Fatigue
- A weaker immunity system
- A withdrawal from everyone around you
- Feeling restless consistently
- Avoiding any stressful situations
- Inability to cope
- Confusion or being worried
- Overwhelmed or feeling helpless
- Anger or irritability
These changes can impact your thoughts. They can:
- Leave you struggling to concentrate or make decisions
- Make you feel less confident about yourself
- Lead to you having a negative attitude towards your life and yourself.
It can make anyone feel awful, right?
But do you think stress has a positive side to it? Let us explore!
Can Stress Be A Good Thing For You?
Not all stress is bad, frankly speaking. You get stressed when you sit on a roller coaster or watch a scary movie. It is just a reaction to what you are seeing. Hence, whether you face stress from watching a scary movie or too much work at your workplace, the body experiences similar signs. It can give a positive outcome if you see it as a challenge for yourself and strive to overcome it. It can be a motivating factor at times.
So, When Does Stress Become A Problem?
Most of the stressors you may face are parts of your life you cannot escape, like work, finances, and relationships. So, when you experience it for a long time, you start feeling unpleasant and experience sleep problems too. It leads to depression and anxiety if it continues for long.