Stress: emotional and spiritual meaning

What stress is

Stress is a response of adaptation to an event, a situation, a danger, real or imagined. Any situation that asks more of the organism brings it on. Lived in an extreme way, it turns into distress. The demand may be psychological, the pressure of the people around you. It may be physical, a heavy demand on the body from work, sport, heat or cold. It may be chemical, medicines, chemotherapy, a hormonal change. Those physical and chemical forms need ordinary medical sense. They are not only a mood.

The reading below looks at the reaction, which the source says matters more than the stress itself.

The emotional meaning of stress

Stress can be as positive, stimulating and creative as it can be threatening to the body. Depending on your reaction to the situation and to the emotions underneath, the effect is beneficial or harmful. Even a happy event can bring an important stress. The source's example is winning a great sum of money, and then living a depression because you feel there is so much to change that you fear you will not manage. Will you keep the job and the people you value? Will your friends stay the same with you? Will you have to move? Will you be able to adapt to all of it?

The entry does not tie stress to one organ. It is the whole capacity to adapt.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to abolish demand. The emotional perspective invites you to question the reaction before you blame the event.

• Name the kind of demand. People, the body, or a chemical change. They are not the same problem.
• Notice if a good change is the frightening one. Adaptation, not the event's mood, is the issue.
• Look at motives and attitude. The source asks you to stop throwing the blame outward.
• Learn to relax, and also to use the stimulus. Both are in the remedy it offers.