Stress Definition - How to Define Stress

Stress is a bi fold emotional experience with positive and negative features. Survival requires some amount of stress but beyond a particular point the pressure of stress becomes exhaustive and even fatal.

Definitions galore are there in describing stress documented in different psychology and medical journals. So the definition of stress has different shades and different perspectives. Let us explore and examine a few of them now.

Stress as separation anxiety

When stress is seen as a result of separation, it can be defined as an emotional response due to early separation from mother. As separation anxiety stress will lead to depression and substance abuse in adult life.

Stress as post traumatic reaction

Stress after a traumatic experience is defined as post traumatic stress disorder where there are intense and extreme fear regarding personal safety without any specific cause, recurrent thoughts of traumatic events, night mares, poor quality of sleep, feeling of detachment, emotional numbness etc.

Stress as Bio psychological reaction

Hans Selye an Austro-Canadian endocrinologist is the first to define stress as a bio psychological reaction. To explain this he adopted a stress model popularly known as General Adaptation Syndrome or GAS model during 1936. According to him the stimuli of stress or stressors are seen through three individual stages-alarm, resistance and exhaustion. Stress is felt at alarm stage while the body breaks down during exhaustion stage.

Stress as Eustress and distress

According to Richard Lazarus, a psychology professor and cognitive mediational theorist form University of California, in 1974, stress was defined as either of two types-eustress or distress. Eustress was perceived to be good stress while distress was considered unhealthy.

Eustress includes all good experiences like preparing for examination, meeting a goal, marriage, buying a new property, receiving the news of promotion etc. The same event, on the other hand can be included in the distress list if seen in a different angle like taking excess pressure before examination.

There are many other definitions for stress as well. The above mentioned definitions however are very widely known and seen by many people around the world. Understand of stress necessitates an in depth study hence the definition of stress is too complicated. Here the intention to give a general over view of the definition of stress.

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