Stress
Stress is defined as a person's or animal's reaction to a potential stressor; it is the mechanism through which the body responds to any given situation. It can also be characterized as an individual experience brought on by excessive pressure and disparate weights. The stimuli that impact a person modify the body's mechanism as it realigns itself to the stressor. When a person is stressed, the brain re-integrates by initiating some responses and, at times, dumping chemicals into the bloodstream (Fink, 2016). The essay will focus on prior personal stress related to Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS), with a particular experience in my case being a sense of neglect. The sense of neglect affected my social life as well as academics, and there was a total paradigm shift in my life. I got neglected by my parents at a tender age due to their constant disagreements. It is not easy to live as a kid separated from your parents, and as such, I got much affected by feeling so neglected. As a result of this, I had to shed off some friends; I confronted some because I felt they were becoming too much to me and were getting on my nerves trying to scold me over this unfortunate occurrence. My performance in class got affected as I would hardly concentrate fully, and would often skip classes. The only solace I had at the time were my spiritual friends, prayer, the few Bible texts I read and the spiritual songs especially the hymnal. Through this, I was able to get over and understand that this was purely my life and I needed to be the driver.
The first stage of GAS is known as the alarm reaction. At this juncture, it is common practice for the body to release adrenaline, the body muscles get tensed, the breathing rate increases, the heart beat increases, perspiration increases, the belly may scrunch, and the eyes may dilate depending on the stressor and its impact on the particular individual. It is usually initiated by nature involuntarily without even the affected person realizing it to combat the stressor (Fink, 2016). If the stressor gets taken away, the body will come back to its form. I felt neglected from an earlier age and when I joined campus and the support of the parents gradually dwindled. I could hardly read my facial expression, but I can remember my junior classmates telling me that everything was wrong since I was not the person they had known before.
The second stage is resistance to the stress; it tends to be more of a long-term solution. The body responds by secreting more hormones which will increase the amount of sugar in the blood to raise the blood pressure and sustain energy. The outer covering of adrenaline releases a hormone that called corticosteroids to sustain the resistance (Fink, 2016). Once the feeling of being neglected set in, I could hardly concentrate in class, always felt tired, easily annoyed and lost appetite for virtually all my favorite meals. My wish was to be left all alone from my comrades, not even music was a consolation as it seemed to be noise to my ears.
The third stage is exhaustion, at this point, the body runs out of immunity and body energy. The emotional, cerebral and the physical resources suffer greatly. The blood sugar is very low, depletion of the adrenals, the tolerance to stress becomes very low, illness and collapse (Fink, 2016). In my personal experience, living in denial for some time, ulcers set in. Stress has a positive correlation with the disease as it affects the immunity system, the continuously high levels of cortisol lead to the destruction of the immune system through the production of the interleukin-6, a messenger for the immune system.
In conclusion, stress is a chronic challenge more so when we sustain it for an extended period of time, it ends up hurting us. Better means of dealing with personal stress are beyond us. We need to be aware that we cannot be out own physicians, in fact, there is one great doctor, God.
Reference
Fink, G. (2016). ""Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome: Stress-Induced Gastro-Duodenal Ulceration and inflammatory bowel disease."" Journal of Endocrinology, 232(3), F1-F5. doi:10.1530/joe-16-0547
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