Stress means different things to different people. One person’s stress freak out is another’s great adventure. The only thing to remember is, if you feel stressed then whatever is going on in your life is stressful to you and requires change.
Pressure and stress are different and it’s important to make the distinction. When we hear things in the media about stress being good for you they are not actually talking about stress, they are talking about pressure. Under pressure the body experiences some quite major physiological changes which were designed millennia ago through evolution to help the organism, in this case, what eventually became mankind, to handle and survive a raw world full of serious and life threatening danger. Typically this is called the adrenaline fight or flight response.
What was the stress fight/flight response for?
In the dim and distant past of our ancestors, a roaming hunter gatherer society our adrenaline response was triggered for much the same reasons as animals experience today.
Real and present danger, potentially life threatening and requiring immediate action to ensure survival. Too that end the adrenaline response very simplistically helps us to fight off the marauding tribes of an enemy or a wild animal intent on eating us, to run away from the danger and in some cases to freeze and hide until the danger has passed.
In the modern human jungle real and present life threatening danger is, for most of us, limited or even non-existent. Our society has evolved to the point where most of us are safe from those kinds of dangers. Alas, our adrenaline response has not.
Our adrenaline response is still operating as if we are experiencing real and present danger and in the human jungle we perceive these ‘threats’ far more frequently and from many more sources not only than our ancestors experienced but also in a way that the adrenaline response was not designed for.
A Definition of Stress
Stress can therefore be defined as too much pressure. The fight/flight response in overdrive and active far more than it was originally designed for.
Importantly as well in the human jungle of the modern world, this fight/flight response is usually activated in response to psychological stimuli, the perception of threat. Which means that the human being is the only animal capable of activating the fight/flight response with a thought.
The perception of threat, thoughts about the threat is the source of most of the stress related problems we experience and fortunately is one of the ways we can alleviate it too.