Stress: Unavoidable Necessity

Stress: Unavoidable Necessity

Experiencing stress is a very common sensation. It is easy for everybody to describe its symptoms, but defining stress itself is more complicated because stress requires psychological and medical concepts to give an exact and understandable definition. "Stress is a specific response by the body to a stimulus, as fear or pain, that disturbs or interferes with the normal physiological equilibrium. It is a physical, mental, or emotional strain or tension" (The New Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language).

Scientists started to think, in the late nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, that diseases are caused by external factors, like bacteria, thanks to the discovery of Rudolph Virchov, a German physician, and Louis Pasteur, a French doctor. However, the mental aspect was totally ignored at this time (Levi 15-16). The study of stress is inseparable from the study of psychology or psychiatry, which were not recognized before medicine started to change. Indeed, medicine specialization was born because the tools for examining patients were too sophisticated for any doctors to know how to use all of them. As a result, heart doctors, eye doctors, ear doctors, etc., appeared (Levi 16). While medicine became more and more efficient because doctors were increasingly qualified in their own skills, scientists started to be aware that in addition to their bodies patients had a mind which could suffer and influence the development of a disease. Psychiatry was born (Levi 16-17). Clearly, science realized that stress could affect the body.

Everybody should be aware that a disease could occur because of a mental problem, especially because of stress. This health issue will be discussed by explaining, on the one hand, what can cause stress by taking into account the nervous system, the psychosomatic tendencies, and the modern world. Then, on the other hand, the effects of stress and how the body reacts against it will be looked at. Finally, some solutions to fighting stress will be presented.

Where does stress come from? Most scientists agree that stress is the result of a situation where too many problems or difficulties take place at the same time. For the person who lives in such circumstances, it becomes impossible to manage and to find any solutions for his or her difficulties. As a result this person feels oppressed by the situation and becomes stressed. Of course, everybody reacts in a different way in the face of unfortunate events, and for many people it is easy to manage stress, which is the normal reaction, without any damage to the body.