Expanded Pathways

Stress is really hard to define because what stresses us out is different for everyone. With this in mind, here’s a definition of stress that I like: Stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.

In other words, people feel little stress when they have the time, experience and resources to manage a situation. They feel great stress when they think they can’t handle the demands. Stress is an experience. It is not an inevitable consequence of an event: it depends on people’s perceptions of a situation and their ability to cope with it.

Although there’s an innate stress response to unexpected events, most of the stress that we are faced with is a response, in part, to the way we think. Stress reactions from our thoughts generate the same stress response as if you were in physical danger.

The interesting thing is that it doesn’t take a major fear to stress us.  All it takes is a situation where we believe ourselves to not have the resources to manage the event at hand, big or small. Some times those “little things” that throw us over the edge are big stressors because we no longer feel we have the resources to cope.

(more…)