Mental Health Care

Like it or not, stress-the modern day sabre-toothed tiger­is on the loose. Ready to snarl and gnaw at you and make mincemeat of you, if you let it. You must not fight it, nor flee from the scene, but keep it on a leash without letting it get perilously dose. This may not be easy. Its progeny romps everywhere, be it the streets of your city, your office, or home, in so many shapes and forms that you may sometimes even fail to recognize their real face till they are at your neck.

Stress pundits believe that Homo sapiens were never under so much pressure before. At the dawn of human history, man did have the demands of protection from natural elements-rain, sun, darkness at night, extremes of temperature, storms, and hurricanes, he had to hunt for food and shelter, was himself hunted, but the dangers were recognizable, not lurking in the dark.

The modern jungle is far more menacing and treacherous. Panic over a deadline, fiercely competitive workplace, an insecure boss, people not keeping time and sending the entire day’s schedule into a topspin, over crowded housing facilities, long queues, jam-packed roads, honks and hackles, a reckless driver on one’s tail are the new beasts over which you have no control. They can make your muscles tense, set your heart and lungs racing, put the teeth on edge, wash you up with your sweat, and you cannot even pick a rock and hurl at them. The physiological elements that prepared our ancestors for the fight-or-flee response serve no useful purpose in these settings. The burst of adrenaline is inappropriate to today’s social stresses. It is in fact dangerous and takes a heavy toll on your physical and psychological well-being.

What is Stress?

Before we take a reality test on different elements of modern day stress, let us try and understand what stress actually means. Broadly, it is an unpleasant state of emotional and physiological arousal that we experience in situations that we perceive as dangerous or threatening to our well-being; yet, if you ask people what stress means to them each may come up with a different answer. Some people describe stress as events that cause them to feel tension, pressure, or negative emotions such as anxiety and anger. Others view stress as the response to adverse situation. However, most psychologists regard stress as a process involving a person’s interpretation and response to a threatening situation.

To be honest, none of the descriptions are wide off the mark. Yet the simplest definition is the one enunciated by the founding father of stress research, Dr. Hans Selye. Born in Austria, Selye was a medical student at the University of Prague when he got interested in what he described as a pre-disease ’stress syndrome’ and devoted more than 50 years of his life to work out and identify its secrets. According to Dr. Selye, stress is simply ‘the rate of wear and tear in the body’.

The wear and tear occurs when the flight-or-fight response gets too pervasive, becomes chronic, and allows no let-ups. It is associated with an extraordinary set of physiochemical changes, with ramifications in the brain, the nervous system, and in almost all the major organs of the body.

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