Life can be very stressful these days due to a variety of reasons. Humanity is progressing faster and faster and the increasing pace of technological progress can put a lot of demand on our lives. Our ever increasing connectedness and always-on always-available status can also become an annoyance as well as a blessing. Hence, awareness of stress, its causes and how to handle it is critical for anyone willing to improve and become better at what they do. This article explores various types of stress and what symptoms to look for to know if you are getting stressed.

Types of Stress

Stress can be categorised to the following two types:

• Internal Stress. These are mainly psychological problems such as worrying about something, inability to do something promised, lack of confidence and so on.
• External Stress. These stresses are mainly produced by physical conditions and the environment a person lives in such as a noisy environment, cold weather, abusive relationships, bullying, being intimidated and so on.

Amount of Stress

Another way to categorise stress is based on the dimension of time. There are generally two types:

• Acute Stress. These are basically short term behaviour in response to an immediate threat that needs to be addressed. As long as the threat is active, you will feel stressed. Your heart rate goes up, there is adrenaline rush, you feel much more aware of your soundings and are sensitive to additional stress. When the threat is reduced, you will return to normal behaviour and your body’s function gets restored as well. You heart rate gradually drops to normal and you will breath normally too. Effectively this is a fight-or-flight reaction. Examples that can lead to such stress are overcrowding, loud noise, violent threat, aggressive bullying and so on.
• Chronic Stress. These stresses are continuous and usually persist unless addressed. For example, stress due to work pressure and meeting deadlines, isolation, academic worries, giving presentations and public performances, financial worries and so on.

Symptoms

It is useful to be aware of the signs of stress. A lot of times people who are stressed, especially the chronic stress, don’t really know how damaging the stress can be over time and knowing that they are indeed stressed can be a first step in moving forward to handle them.

There are basically 4 types of symptoms to look for:

• Physical symptoms. The easiest and most familiar symptoms of stress are physical. Examples are increased heart rate, sweating, dry mouth, nausea. Prolonged physical stress can lead to long term physical problems such as backache, migraine, high blood pressure, ulcers, loss of hair, weakened immune system and so on.
• Behavioural symptoms. Another class of symptoms that are easy to spot are behavioural in nature. Examples are: increased alcohol consumptions, pacing around a limited area, nail biting, lip chewing, increased smoking, severe daydreaming, eating too much, eating too little and so on.
• Emotional symptoms. It may not always be obvious that these emotional symptoms are due to stress so it is important to keep an eye on them. Examples are: depression, crying, hopelessness, shouting, anger, high sensitivity, irritability, impatience, anxiety and so on.
• Cognitive symptoms. These are the by-products of being stressed. Examples are inability to concentrate well, overreacting to small events, difficulty in making decisions, forgetting, rushing into decisions, paranoia and so on.

Handling Stress

Stress can be handled in many ways though most solutions go through the following three main stages.

1. Recognise and accept that you are under stress. The first step to accept the problem. If you think you have a problem, you are unlikely to do anything about it. Recognise the signs of stress. Look for symptoms and ask yourself why you should suffer from these symptoms. Are you always tired? Are you feeling that life is becoming repetitive? Are you suffering from lack of sleep?

2. Search for causes. Once you know you are getting stressed, search for the causes of stress. Look at your daily life. When are you most stressed? Look for what you do just immediately beforehand. As you saw earlier, chronic stress may be the result of prolonged stress. So you may have to study yourself more to see what leads to your stress. When you are generally stressed, even small things can prove to be a chore. It is easy to point at them as the cause of stress, though this can be a mistake. Maybe you have been simply sensitive about it and the root cause of your stress is something else, something more fundamental than the little event. Search and examine your life to find out.

3. Deal with the issue. The last step is to accept the problem and devise a strategy to deal with it. Draw up actions and commit yourself to them. Set reminders to check yourself periodically to make sure you are following up with your actions.

As you can see, dealing with stress can be systematic and methodical and all it takes to reduce your stress is to commit yourself to deal with it.

One way to get trained on stress management is to attend stress management training courses. Alternatively, if you have overstressed staff and want to reduce their stress levels, you can use stress management training materials and setup a course on stress management to teach them how to handle their stress more effectively. For details on training resources see below.