Natural Healing

These factors generate various symptoms of emotional and mental stress, the most common including: anger, anxiety, worry, fear, and depression.

Negative stress

Excessive, prolonged and unrelieved stress can have a harmful effect on mental, physical and spiritual health. If left unresolved, the feelings of anger, frustration, fear and depression generated by stress can trigger a variety of illnesses.

It is estimated that stress is the most common cause of ill health in modern society, probably underlying as many as 80 per cent of all visits to family doctors. Stress is a contributory factor in relatively minor conditions, such as headaches, digestive problems, skin complaints, insomnia and ulcers, but also plays an important role in the leading causes of death in the western world-cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disorders, accidental injuries, cirrhosis of the liver and suicide.

Positive stress

Stress can also have a positive effect. It is essential in spurring motivation and awareness, providing the stimulation needed to cope with challenging situations. Tension and arousal are necessary for the enjoyment of many aspects of life, and without them existence would be pretty dull.

Stress also provides the sense of urgency and alertness needed for survival when confronting threatening situations, such as crossing a busy road or driving in poor weather conditions. An overly relaxed approach in such situations could be fatal.

Stress and the individual

There is no single level of stress that is optimal for all people. Everyone is different, with unique perceptions of, and reactions to, events: what is distressing to one person may be a joy to another. A person who loves to work alone would be stressed in a job that involved high levels of social interaction, whereas the person who thrives as part of a team would very likely be stressed in a job that involved working from home.

Even when we agree that a particular event is distressing, we are likely to differ in our physiological and psychological responses to it. Some individuals are more sensitive to stress than others, owing to experiences in childhood and the influence of teachers, parents, religion, etc.

It is also important to note that most of the stress that we experience is actually self-generated. How we perceive life-whether an event makes us feel threatened or stimulated, encouraged or discouraged, happy or sad-depends to a large extent on how we perceive ourselves.

Self-generated stress is something of a paradox, because so many people think of external causes when they are upset. Recognizing that we create most of our own upsets is an important first step towards coping with them.