HEALTH AND WELLBEING.

Stress. 

Much has been written on stress and its effects on health, with many viewing it through different lenses from it’s deleterious effects to its positive repercussions. Positive stress is known as eustress and explains how the experience of how specific kinds of stress can foster growth. Dr Kelly Mc Gonigal a health psychologist and author, in her 2013 TED talk highlights that it maybe our beliefs that surround stress that causes impacts on our health rather than the stress itself. Stress, defined as a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances, causes biophysical changes within the body. Largely attributed as a nervous system response, excessive or unfamiliar demands and threats to the body engage not only the nervous system, but all systems, including the immune and the hormonal systems amongst others. Undeniably stress is an feature within all our lives as we encounter challenges, uncertainty and situations that arise beyond our control. Our capacity to negate these is deeply personal and layered, depending on our disposition, our histories and our internal and external resources. Stress maybe likened to the wind that sculpts and moulds us to the conditions of our environment, like cliffs with their gullies and crevases. So often we navigate these forces silently, as something to overcome, rather than to embrace, to feel, to express and to understand- what is it that causes our stress and why, where do we feel it and what significance does it hold for us?

References and Further Reading.

01. Mc Gonigal Kelly. How to Make Stress your Friend. TED. June 2013. https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend?subtitle=en&geo=es

02.Mate Gabor, 2003, When the body says no, the cost of hidden stress, Scribe Publications, Brunswick Australia.