Psychology - Stress essays

Psychology - Stress essays For my assignment I decided to write about stress. This is a subject, that as a first-year, mature student with a family, I felt was quite applicable. I intend to look at a period in December 2000 rather that reflecting upon the last nine months, although the whole of the nine months has been stressful. I thought long and hard what is stressing me out? The answer was easy; everything is stressing me out. I read several articles about stress, looking at leaflets, module handouts, textbooks and Internet articles. I decided, that to enable me to cope with my stress, I had to look at the taxonomy of stress. Firstly, what is stress? Stress can mean many things to different people. Some may define stress in terms of pressure, tension, unpleasant external forces or emotional response. Lazarus and Launier (1978) defined stress as a transaction between people and the environment. Within this definition, stress involves an interaction between the stressor and distress. Stressor can be defined as the external environment and the response to this stressor is described as distress. Some people appear to be more strongly affected by stressors than other people or may be affected more on one occasion than another. The reason for this appears to lie in mediating factors, factors that influence the transaction between people and their environments. Stress is therefore not a specific event, it is a process in which the intensity of stress responses depends on how stressors are mediated by factors such as the way people think about them and the skills and resources they have to cope with them. Through quite extensive reading, I identified with a particular stress model Cannons fight of flight model (1932). This model was developed by Cannon in 1932, which suggested that external threats elicited the fight or flight responses. Within Cannons model, stress was defined as a response to external stressors...