While there is good stress, very often unpleasant events in life lead to stress, which can have serious impact on your health

One hears all the time that he or she is under stress, that stress is causing so many diseases, that stress is killing slowly and so on and so on - stress looks like a mysterious killer that is hiding behind the corner, ready to do its dirty job. But what actually is stress? And how do you know that you are under stress?

Definition of Stress

Well, there is no single definition of stress but generally stress can be described as a condition when there is a conflict between your values, abilities, attitudes and the surrounding environment. In other words, you are put in a situation in which you are pressed by responsibility, requirements, moral obligation, etc to react in a certain way but you can't or are not willing to. Most often the pressure is external and it is out of your control to stop it. The situation can be at work, at home, at school or anywhere, you spend many hours a day.

As seen from the above paragraph, stress must be something that is always around us. To some extent this is true, although you can't qualify every single unpleasant situation as stress. If you break your nail, this is not stress. But if you break your neck and as a result of this injury you are unable to lead a normal life for months afterwards, breaking your neck is a stress factor. Losing a job can also cause stress, though if you didn't like your job and you can easily find a better one, this actually is not stress but a reason to be happy. But if you depend on that job and you can't find anything else, then certainly you are subject to stress.

How Do I Know That I Am Subject to Stress?

One of the characteristics of stress is that different people react in different ways to it. The example with losing a job partially illustrates it because in one case losing a job is a reason to be happy and in the other it is a cause of stress. And if you are under stress because of losing your job this can be manifested in many ways – you can start to eat more, or stop eating at all, you can start to have sleeping disorders, your hair might start to fall (yes, stress can trigger hair loss ), or you might experience the symptoms of various diseases without actually having them.

But stress could also go unnoticed – i.e. without visible symptoms, which however does not mean that your body is not affected in a negative way. On the contrary, it is affected but the damage is still invisible. A typical example is cancer. Although there is no research that stress alone causes cancer, it is a known fact that stress (especially long-term stress) can speed it up if your body is predisposed to form cancer cells. So in a sense it is much better if you can see the damage and take measures to repair it.

Stress is not something new – even ancient people have experienced it, though in very different forms. Stress is a threat that can do you harm and you need to react to stop it and your body mobilizes all its resources in order to fight the enemy. Well, in ancient times the enemy was certainly different from today's stress causes but still the way our body reacts to external threats (the so called stress response) has not changed. In fact, stress in small quantities is useful for our good shape but very often the boundary between a challenge and threat is blurred and being exposed to stress all the time definitely shortens our lives – even more than cigarettes or moderate alcohol use, as many experts believe!