STRESS

Stress is a condition you are dynamic when an individual is faced with the opportunities, demands, or resources related to what is desirable by individuals, and the results are considered uncertain and important. Stress is not always bad, though usually discussed in a negative context, because the stress has a positive value when it becomes an opportunity now offers the potential outcome. For example, many professionals look at the pressure of heavy workloads and tight deadlines as a positive challenge to raise the quality of their work and the satisfaction they get from their work.

Stress can be positive and negative. The researchers argue that the stress challenge, or stress that accompanies the challenges in the workplace, operate quite differently from stress resistance, or stress that hinders in achieving its objectives. Although research on stress and stress challenges new obstacles early stages, preliminary evidence indicates that stress has many implications that challenge less negative than the stress resistance.

History and usage

The term stress had none of its contemporary connotations before the 1950s. It is a form of the Middle English destresse, derived via Old French from the Latin stringere, "to draw tight."

It had long been in use in physics to refer to the internal distribution of a force exerted on a material body, resulting in strain. In the 1920s and 1930s, the term was occasionally being used in psychological circles to refer to a mental strain or unwelcome happening, and by advocates of holistic medicine to refer to a harmful environmental agent that could cause illness. Walter Cannon used it in 1934 to refer to external factors that disrupted what he called homeostasis.

The novel usage arose out of Selye's 1930s experiments. He started to use the term to refer not just to the agent but to the state of the organism as it responded and adapted to the environment. His theories of a universal non-specific stress response attracted great interest and contention in academic physiology and he undertook extensive research programs and publication efforts.

However, while the work attracted continued support from advocates of psychosomatic medicine, many in experimental physiology concluded that his concepts were too vague and unmeasurable. During the 1950s, Selye turned away from the laboratory to promote his concept through popular books and lecture tours. He wrote for both non-academic physicians and, in an international bestseller entitled Stress of Life, for the general public.

A broad biopsychosocial concept of stress and adaptation offered the promise of helping everyone achieve health and happiness by successfully responding to changing global challenges and the problems of modern civilization. He coined the term "eustress" for positive stress, by contrast to distress.

He argued that all people have a natural urge and need to work for their own benefit, a message that found favor with industrialists and governments.[20] He also coined the term stressor to refer to the causative event or stimulus, as opposed to the resulting state of stress.

From the late 1960s, academic psychologists started to adopt Selye's concept; they sought to quantify "life stress" by scoring "significant life events," and a large amount of research was undertaken to examine links between stress and disease of all kinds. By the late 1970s, stress had become the medical area of greatest concern to the general population, and more basic research was called for to better address the issue.

There was renewed laboratory research into the neuroendocrine, molecular, and immunological bases of stress, conceived as a useful heuristic not necessarily tied to Selye's original hypotheses. By the 1990s, "stress" had become an integral part of modern scientific understanding in all areas of physiology and human functioning, and one of the great metaphors of Western life. Focus grew on stress in certain settings, such as workplace stress. Stress management techniques were developed.

Its psychological uses are frequently metaphorical rather than literal, used as a catch-all for perceived difficulties in life. It also became a euphemism, a way of referring to problems and eliciting sympathy without being explicitly confessional, just "stressed out."

It covers a huge range of phenomena from mild irritation to the kind of severe problems that might result in a real breakdown of health. In popular usage, almost any event or situation between these extremes could be described as stressful. 

The most extreme events and reactions may elicit the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to one or more terrifying events that threatened or caused grave physical harm. PTSD is a severe and ongoing emotional reaction to an extreme psychological trauma; as such, it is often associated with soldiers, police officers, and other emergency personnel.

This stressor may involve viewing someone's actual death, a threat to the patient's or someone else's life, serious physical injury, or threat to physical or psychological integrity, overwhelming usual psychological defenses coping. In some cases, it can also be from profound psychological and emotional trauma, apart from any actual physical harm. Often, however, the two are combined.

The US military became a key center of stress research,[citation needed] attempting to understand and reduce combat neurosis and psychiatric casualties.

Potential sources of stress

Environmental factors : In addition to affecting the design of an organizational structure, environmental uncertainty also affects the stress levels of employees and organizations. Changes in business cycles create economic uncertainty, for example, when the economy worsens people feel anxious about the continuity of his work.

Organizational factors : Many factors within the organization that can cause stress. The pressure to avoid errors or complete tasks within a tight, excessive workload, the employer who is always demanding and insensitive, and unpleasant coworkers are a few of them. It can classify these factors into the demands of tasks, roles, and interpersonal.

Task demands are factors associated with a person's job. These demands include the design of individual jobs, working conditions, and physical layout of the work. For example, work in a room that is too tight or in a location that has always disturbed by the noise can increase anxiety and stress. With the growing importance of customer service, a job that demands emotional factors can be a source of stress.

Role demands related to the pressure given to someone as a function of the particular role it plays in the organization. Role conflict creates expectations that may be difficult to be completed or fulfilled.

Interpersonal demands are pressures created by the employee. The lack of support from colleagues and poor interpersonal relationships can cause stress, especially among employees who have high social needs.

Personal factors: 

Personal factors consist of family issues, personal economic problems, as well as personality and character inherent in a person.

National surveys consistently show that people place great importance on family and personal relationships. the difficulties of married life, relationship breakdown, and the difficulty of discipline problems with children are some examples of problems that create stress relationship.

Economic problems due to lifestyle greater than the pole peg is another personal obstacles that create stress for employees and employee distraction. The study of three different organizations show that the symptoms of stress were reported before the start of the work is largely a variance from a variety of stress symptoms reported nine months later. This led the researchers to the conclusion that some people have an inherent tendency for the situation to accent the negative aspects of the world in general. If this conclusion is correct, individual factors that significantly affect the stress is the nature of a person. That is, the symptoms of stress can be expressed in the work actually comes from the personality of the man.

Stress impacts

Stress manifest themselves in various ways. For example, an individual who is under stress may experience severe high blood pressure, ulcers, so easily annoyed, hard to make decisions that are routine, loss of appetite, prone to accidents, and so on. As a result of stress can be grouped into three general categories: physiological symptoms, psychological symptoms, and behavioral symptoms.

The influence of symptoms is usually a symptom of physiological stress. There is research that concludes that stress can create changes in metabolism, increased heart rate and breathing, increased blood pressure, cause headaches, and trigger heart attacks.

Work-related stress can lead to dissatisfaction with work-related. Dissatisfaction is the psychological effect is simple but the most tangible manifestation of stress. But stress also appeared in several other psychological conditions, for example, tension, anxiety, irritability, boredom, and attitude who like to procrastinate.

Stress-related symptoms include behavioral changes in the level of productivity, absenteeism, and turnover of employees, as well as changes in eating habits, patterns of smoking, alcohol consumption, stuttering speech, as well as anxiety and sleep disorders. There are a lot of research that investigated the stress-performance relationship. The pattern of the most studied in the literature stress-performance is inverted U-relationship. The underlying logic is that the stress levels low to medium stimulates the body and enhance its ability to react. This inverted U-pattern describes the reaction to the stress from time to time and to changes in the intensity of stress.
SOURCE : wikipedia.org