Stress is a popular term used by people in everyday life. The pressures of everyday life sometimes require dealing with them or dealing with them and stretching the body beyond its natural capacity. They are called stressors. Stress is a natural, dynamic and interactive process that occurs as people adapt to their environment.
Definition of stress
Throughout our lives, we all have to adapt to the environment in which we live. Most of the time, this process is smooth, but it can be difficult, causing conflict and disagreement.
The word stress comes from the Latin “stringere” which means “difficulty”.
Stress can be defined as “any event, situation, circumstance, demand, pressure or tension that disrupts or threatens to disrupt the functioning of an individual, resulting in physical, mental and emotional strain”.
Stress is the negative reaction that people have to excessive pressures or other types of demands placed on them. It happens when they fear they won’t be able to cope.
Stress can be defined as “Any physical or psychological event perceived as a threat to physical or emotional well-being (Oliver et. al. 1999).
Stress is a normal, natural and ongoing process of life as we adapt to our environment. It is an internal alarm system that prepares our body to act.
Stress is a “dynamic condition in which an individual is faced with an opportunity, constraint, or demand related to what he desires and the outcome of which is perceived as both uncertain and important” – Robbins, 2001
Stress appears almost as a kind of necessary comfort talk, a tranquilizer to deal with the diversity of competing messages about the truth of this world and the terrible uncertainty of our times. Stress talk reassures us by explaining how it is normal to feel stressed under these conditions, and it offers strategies to help us deal with it by being alert and fit – Newton, 1995
Stress is a condition resulting from the interaction of people and their work and characterized by changes in people that cause them to deviate from their normal functioning – Beehr and Newman (1978)
Stress is basically a psychological state induced by external conditions that release or restrict certain chemicals in the brain; this in turn can lead to a psychological change in the individual resulting in a change in behavior. It is associated with the psychological perception of an individual faced with the pressure of the unexpected. A pioneer in stress research saw it as a response, not as an environmental stimulus, or as a situation where the demands exceed the individual’s adaptive capacities. – Winfield, bishop and potter
There are three stages in the experience of stress. Alarm; The individual has a reduced resistance when he is in a state of psychological imbalance, which does not allow him to coexist in a conforming way in the environment. Resistance; The individual adapts to the stimulus, which allows him to eventually return to a state of psychological equilibrium. Exhaustion; It happens when the will and ability to adapt to the stimulus breaks down. This will lead to “giving up” or resigning oneself to the inevitable and will lead to psychological damage and physical health. -Syle (1945)
For Giddens, stress could be seen in part as a consequence of the growing uncertainty of modern life. As Giddens (1991) points out, we no longer have clear sources of authority, such as those traditionally provided by religious authorities. Instead, there is an “undefined pluralism of expertise” that “some individuals find psychologically difficult or impossible to accept”. According to Giddens’ account, the problem of stress is likely to appear as fundamentally social, moral and institutional.
For Cooper, stress is seen as the product of an interaction between individual needs and resources and the various demands, constraints and facilitators within the individual’s immediate environment. Cooper (1986) presents a comprehensive overview of the causes of job stress and the organizational and individual problems that can arise when the individual worker experiences these stressors. The medical terminology adopted by Cooper facilitates the task of sanitizing organizational life by implying that the individual and organizational results of stress are obviously pathological and therefore require treatment rather than enlightenment.
The Robbins model (this model adopts the transactional perspective found in many stress models of the 1980s) identifies three sets of factors: environmental, organizational, and individual that act as stressors.
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Creation date Monday, October 19, 2020 Views 2719