If not managed appropriately, stress can lead to serious problems. Exposure to chronic stress can contribute to both physical illnesses, such as heart disease, and mental illnesses, such as anxiety disorders. The field of health psychology focuses in part on how stress affects bodily functioning and on how people can use stress management techniques to prevent or minimize disease.
The circumstances that cause stress are called stressors. Stressors vary in severity and duration. For example, the responsibility of caring for a sick parent may be an ongoing source of major stress, whereas getting stuck in a traffic jam may cause mild, short-term stress. Some events, such as the death of a loved one, are stressful for everyone. But in other situations, individuals may respond differently to the same event—what is a stressor for one person may not be stressful for another. For example, a student who is unprepared for a chemistry test and anticipates a bad grade may feel stress, whereas a classmate who studies in advance may feel confident of a good grade. For an event or situation to be a stressor for a particular individual, the person must appraise the situation as threatening and lack the coping resources to deal with it effectively.
Stressors can be classified into three general categories: catastrophic events, major life changes, and daily hassles. In addition, simply thinking about unpleasant past events or anticipating unpleasant future events can cause stress for many people.
Two main stressors are known as life changes and work places. There are many like frustration, being blocked from a desirable goal, conflict, the experience of tow or more competing or contradictory motives or goals, and pain.
The most stressful events for adults involve major life changes, such as death of a spouse or family member, divorce, imprisonment, losing one’s job, and major personal disability or illness. For adolescents, the most stressful events are the death of a parent or a close family member, divorce of their parents, imprisonment of their mother or father, and major personal disability or illness. Sometimes, apparently positive events can have stressful components. For example, a woman who gets a job promotion may receive a higher salary and greater prestige, but she may also feel stress from supervising co-workers who were once peers. Getting married is usually considered a positive experience, but planning the wedding, deciding whom to invite, and dealing with family members may cause couples to feel stressed.
Life changes are those events that necessitate a major transition in some aspects of our life, these are proceedings like getting married, retiring or dealing with bereavement. These things have such an impact on us; they are sometimes referred as critical life events. There is though substantial variation in the impact of these critical life events. What is greatly stressful to one person, like death of a spouse, may be a blessed relief for another.
Although the term ‘life change’ suggests something must happen in order to cause a person such stress, the same reaction can be found when something does not happen, like not being promoted or not getting to university, can be very stressful life ‘not changes’ for many people.
There have been many ways in which scientists, doctors and psychologists have all researched into why life changes cause stress, and measuring life changes.
Two medical doctors, Holmes and Rahe developed the idea that life changes are linked to stress and illness. In the course of treating patients, they observed that is was often the case that a range of major life events seemed to precede physical illness. These events were both positive and negative experiences that both involved change. Change requires psychic energy to be expended; it’s stressful.
In order to test the idea that life changes are related to physical illness, it was necessary to have some means of measuring life changes. Homes and Rahe developed the Social Readjustment Rating Scale.
They found a positive correlation between change and physical illness. The "Life Change Scale" is a psychological tool which measures the amount of change experienced by a person over a given time interval (Holmes & Rahe, 1967). The "Life Change" questionnaire asks people to mark on a list which important changes they recently underwent: move to a new home, a new job, marriage, divorce, birth of a child, death of a family member, travel, promotion, etc. The total score for a person is calculated as the sum of all changes that the person experienced, multiplied by their relative weights. Using this scale, it was shown that individuals with high life change scores are significantly more likely to fall ill. More surprisingly, it turned out that illness correlates with all changes, positive (such as marriage or promotion) as well as negative (such as divorce or job loss).
Holmes and Rahe’s original assumption, that stress is caused by any event which requires a change, has also been challenged. Positive life changes may be less disturbing than negative life changes. This is apparently true even if the number of life change units assigned to an event on the SRRS is high. For example a ‘major change in the health of a family member’ isles stressful if the change is for the better than the worse. Related to this is the finding that the undesirable aspects of events are at least as important as the fact that they change people’s lives. The top ten events on the SRRS list have a largely negative ‘feel’ about them this implies that the SRRS might be confusing change with negativity.
Various life changes could also cause changes in behaviour, which are not conducive to good health. A person experiencing marital separation might begin to drink heavily and act is other ways to increase risk of illness. The relationship between life changes and illness might be subtler than the direct link claimed by Holmes and Rahe.
The SRRS is, however, a simplistic measuring device, and does not take into account differences in the way people appraise stressors.
The Social Readjustment Rating Scale paved the way for a whole new field of research, investigating the link between life changes and physical illness. There are
been developed new scales for measuring life changes, improving on the SRRS.
Other ways have been discovered of measuring life changes. Daily hassles; this is where DeLongis suggested that the chronic strains of daily living hassles would provide a better measure of stress than looking at acute events. Hassles include worries about money, current affaires, your job, your friends, sex, the weather, looking after your home, losing things. It is likely people differ in the amount of stress related to each hassle and some people might experience the hassle as uplift.
Perceived importance is also another way of measuring life changes, Moos and Swindle produced the Life Stressors and Social Resources Inventory. They identified eight areas of ongoing life stressors; health, home, finance, work, partner, child, extended family, friends.
The ways in which life changes causes stress are bereavement and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Bereavement means the loss something valued. This loss usually involves a death, but it can also be applied to other situations, including the break up of a relationship, or divorce, loss of a job, or coming to terms with a disability. Research into comparative levels with stress connected with important life events shows that the death of a spouse is regarded as the most stressful event. The stressful impact on bereavement is more pronounced if the death is sudden or violent, or if the relationship was one in which one or both partners were very dependent.
Post-traumatic stress disorder can be an extremely debilitating condition that can occur after exposure to a traumatic event in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. The sorts of traumatic events, which can trigger PTSD, include violent personal assaults, accidents, or military combat. People with PSTD may re-experience their ordeal in the form of flashbacks, nightmares or frightening thoughts, especially when they are exposed to events or objects that remind them of the trauma.
Life changes are to an extent a source of stress. But not in all cases is a life change the cause stress, because the change could be a good thing like marriage yet still cause stress.