The two pathways, when aroused, prepare the body for a rush of energy. This makes the blood flow quicker and the heart rate to beat more too. This is to make sure the muscles around your body get the sufficient amount of oxygen to keep up with this increased pressure.
Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome Model
Phase 1: Alarm
Stress – response – systems activated
Phase 2: Resistance
Body copes with stress
Phase 3: Exhaustion
Stress-related illness may develop
- Outline the three stages of General Adaptation Syndrome
General adaptation syndrome has three stages to it.
- Alarm – when we are surprised or threatened, we have an immediate reaction to it. This prepares the body for all different types of situations that may happen to you, and it also works inside the body, without you knowing, getting rid of any unwanted illnesses in your immune system or channelling away any unwanted foods entering your digestive system. We can quickly respond to this by pulling away if something is hot or jumping if something scares you for example.
- Resistance – Our bodies can change rapidly to new things that happen to us. As our body becomes used to the new stress levels, we become more resistant to disease. We can then find it easier to adapt to more stressful situations. But this only works with our immune system because it is constantly fighting new diseases to keep us healthy.
- Exhaustion – soon after your body has been over loaded with new stress levels, our bodies begin to give up trying to maintain its high levels of stress. Many parts of our body start to break down. If these stress levels become too high and our body parts keep breaking down, you could become very ill, and if its gets a very serious situation, you may even die.
- Describe how the body responds to stress
Everybody responds differently to stress. No one body has the same immune system.
There are seven main illnesses that can be brought on by stress. These are:
- Cardiac disease and/or hypertension
- Gastric ulcers
- Some cancers and arthritic conditions
- Colds and ‘flu
- Depression
- Migraine
- Asthma
There are emotional and psychological responses to stress. These two main responses can then be sub-divided into the three most important responses – anxiety, anger and depression. You can feel these types of depression in many ways. You may be excited about a birthday or Christmas, nervous about an exam, scared, worried, frightened if something has happened to a family member, disappointed and angry if you failed in something. These emotions happen to us every day, but if they get too much, they can become very stressful.
The body has an immune system, which tells the body if anything ‘unwanted’ is entering it. The white blood cells, in your blood, fight of these unwanted things because their main function is to engulf and fight off diseases. They produce antibodies, which try and stop you from getting these illnesses and diseases again by ‘highlighting’ any cells, which are un-natural in your body.
When you have stress, your immune system tries to fight it off, like they would any other illness or disease.
- Outline the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis
The stress response originates in the hypothalamus which forms the first link in a chain that also includes the pituitary and adrenal glands, which are also responsible for arousing the ANS (Autonomic Nervous System) in response to a stressor.
