Stress: the plague of our time

Introduction to Emotional Release

❉

We have a positive type of stress, which we would define as the human being’s effective capacity to respond to a stimulus. This type of stress is healthy and is called eustress. It has to do, on a physical level, with the drive and energy that stimulates us to improve ourselves. We all need a certain amount of stress, certain challenges in life, since apathy and routine can lead us to the other type of stress. The body and mind are made to be used for activities that gratify us.

On the other hand, we have negative and harmful stress, which is very common today and is called distress, or what we normally call when we use the term stress. It occurs when the pressure we endure in life or during an event is excessive, lasts too long, or we don’t have enough resources to respond appropriately. There are external factors that have been shown to cause it: haste, the excess of information that bombards us daily, the increasingly artificial way of life, the demands and competitiveness of the workplace, the lack of values ​​in our society, the loss of connection with the earth, and poor nutrition… But how we react and relate to our conflicts is also very important.

Negative stress is democratic; people of any age and social status can experience it. And the same situation can be experienced as threatening or not if the person is internally prepared and has the resources.

Characteristics of negative stress

• The perception of threat overwhelms us.
• We lose the capacity for resilience, which is described as the ability to recover and bounce back from a difficult situation.
• We lack or are unaware of our resources.
• We become more vulnerable and make more mistakes.
• We respond inappropriately and disproportionately to challenges and situations.
• This causes imbalances at all levels and can even have consequences for the body.

The demands and challenges we humans face today are immense and different from those of just a few years ago. The balance has been disrupted; we’ve become more mental and less physical. And this affects, and will increasingly affect, our nervous system in the coming years. The natural balance between the two branches of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic (action and restraint), is unbalanced.

Today, it’s a proven fact through various studies that stress can trigger or aggravate various pathologies. We can consider it a plague of our time, and it will affect a growing number of people. Unfortunately, it’s only after a heart attack or a relationship crisis that some people change their lifestyle habits; or after studying the economic cost of absenteeism that organizations begin to investigate what’s happening.

Authors: Alberto Panizo and Greta Adam
Article published in a digital magazine

«Consciencia Sin Fronteras«