Stress Management: A Comprehensive Guide to Wellness - Softcover

Charlesworth, Edward A.; Nathan, Ronald G.

 
9780345468918: Stress Management: A Comprehensive Guide to Wellness
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345468910 ISBN 13: 9780345468918
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Are you among the 95 million Americans who suffer from stress during these trying times? Revised and comprehensive, this invaluable guide helps you identify the specific areas of stress in your life–familial, work-related, social, emotional–and offers proven techniques for dealing with every one of them. New material includes information on how men and women differ in response to stress, updated statistics on disorders and drugs, the ways terrorism and the information age impact stress, the key benefits of spirituality, alternative medicine, exercise, and nutrition. Stress Management will help you

• test your personal responses to daily stress– and chart your progress in controlling it
• learn specific techniques for relaxation– from “scanning” to “imagery training”
• discover how to deal with life’s critical moments without stress
• embark on a program to improve your physical health as a major step toward stress management
• discern which types of stress must be reduced and which kinds you can turn into positive motivation

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edward A. Charlesworth, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, director of Willowbrook Psychological Associates, P.C., president of Stress Management Research Associates, Inc., and an international consultant to corporations and hospitals. He is also the author of Stress Management: A Comprehensive Guide to Wellness.

Ronald G. Nathan, PhD, is a clinical psychologist. Before entering private practice, Dr. Nathan was an award-winning professor of family practice and psychiatry at Albany Medical College who developed the country’s first required stress-management course for medical students.

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Are you among the 95 million Americans who suffer from stress during these trying times? Revised and comprehensive, this invaluable guide helps you identify the specific areas of stress in your life-familial, work-related, social, emotional-and offers proven techniques for dealing with every one of them. New material includes information on how men and women differ in response to stress, updated statistics on disorders and drugs, the ways terrorism and the information age impact stress, the key benefits of spirituality, alternative medicine, exercise, and nutrition. Stress Management" will help you
- test your personal responses to daily stress- and chart your progress in controlling it
- learn specific techniques for relaxation- from "scanning" to "imagery training"
- discover how to deal with life's critical moments without stress
- embark on a program to improve your physical health as a major step toward stress management
- discern which types of stress must be reduced and which kinds you can turn into positive motivation

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Learning About Stress and Your Life

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but seeing with new eyes.

–Marcel Proust

One

How Do You Respond to Stress?

The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.

—Jimmy Carter

Stress and Our Ancestors

We live in a new age of anxiety, century of stress, and era of terrorism. Once the name Columbine brought to mind only a beautiful mountain flower and September 11 was just another day on the calendar. The history books that our grandchildren read will speak of the alarming increases in health and social problems related to the tensions and stress of our times. You may well ask, has man always been nervous and anxious? The plays of Shakespeare included many examples of the stress response. One of the most respected medical textbooks of the 1600s gave excellent descriptions of anxiety states. In fact, our nervous responses can be traced to the prehistoric cave dweller.

Imagine a cave dweller sitting near a small fire in the comfort of a cave. Suddenly, in the light of the fire, up comes the shadow of a saber-toothed tiger. The body reacts instantly. To survive, the cave dweller had to respond by either fighting or running. A complex part of our brains and bodies called the autonomic nervous system prepared the cave dweller for fight or flight. This nervous system was once thought to be automatic and beyond our control. Here is a partial list of the responses set up by the autonomic nervous system and how you may recognize them from your own experience.

1.Digestion slows and blood is redirected to the muscles and the brain. It is more important to be alert and strong in the face of danger than to digest food. Have you ever felt this as butterflies in your stomach?

2.Breathing gets faster to supply more oxygen for the needed muscles. Can you remember trying to catch your breath after being frightened?

3.The heart speeds up and blood pressure soars, forcing blood to parts of the body that need it. When was the last time you felt your heart pounding?

4.Perspiration increases to cool the body and release a scent signaling preparation for a fight. This allows the body to burn more energy and warns others of danger. Do you use extra deodorant when you know you are going to be under stress?

5.Muscles tense to prepare for rapid action and form muscle “armor” to slow tooth, fist, or spear. Have you ever had a stiff back or neck after a stressful day?

6.Chemicals are released to make the blood clot more rapidly. If injured, this clotting can reduce blood loss. Have you noticed how quickly some wounds stop bleeding?

7.Sugars and fats pour into the blood to provide fuel for quick energy. Have you ever been surprised by your strength and endurance during an emergency?

The cave dweller lived in the jungle or the wilderness and faced many environmental stressors. Often these were immediate, life-threatening events involving dangerous animals or human enemies. For the cave dweller, this fight-or-flight response was very valuable for survival.

Stress and Our Modern World

We have the same automatic stress responses that the cave dweller used for dangerous situations, but now we are seldom faced with a need for fight or flight. If a cat is threatened, it will arch its back. A deer will run into the bush. When we are threatened, we brace ourselves, but we often struggle to contain our nervous reactions because the threat is not usually one of immediate physical harm. Bosses, budgets, audiences, deadlines, and examinations are not life-threatening, but sometimes we feel as though they are.

Smaller stressors and briefer stress responses can add up to hundreds a day. These can be parts of our lives that we hardly notice and almost take for granted. If you work in an office, stress may accumulate with every ring of the telephone and every meeting you squeeze into your already busy day. If you are a homemaker, all the endless tasks you alone have to complete can mount up just as quickly and take just as much of a toll as those faced in the office.

Our ability to think of the past and imagine the future is still another way in which stress responses can be triggered at any time and in any place. In addition, distance is no longer a buffer. Turning on a television or a computer makes us instantly aware of wars, famine, disasters, political unrest, economic chaos, and frightening possibilities for the future.

The rate of change in our lives is accelerating. We need only to read Alvin Toffler’s classic Future Shock or James Gleick’s Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything to realize that the unexpected has become a part of our everyday lives. These unexpected situations are not ones we can overcome physically. Tigers are seen primarily in zoos, but it is as if we see their stripes and sharp teeth manifested in all too many ways in our everyday world.

Not only do we seem to trigger our stress response more often, but also most situations do not provide an outlet for the extra chemical energy produced by our bodies. The fight-or-flight response is not useful for most of the stress situations in modern life because we have few physical battles to fight and almost no- where to run. In the past, the demands for fulfilling basic needs for food and safety made good use of our heightened arousal. Today, few of these outlets are available.

We are influenced not by “facts” but by our interpretation of facts. —Alfred Adler



Physical Stress Versus Emotional Stress

When we think about what has happened or what might happen, we cannot run from our anxieties or physically attack our fears. We are undergoing emotional stress. The body has only limited ways of using the output of its various stress reactions to cope with emotional stress.

Physical stress is different from emotional stress. Even exercise triggers a stress response. In fact, for many years, scientists relied on the research in exercise physiology as a basis for understand- ing the effects of both psychological and physical stress upon the body. Although the effects of physical and emotional stress are similar, we now know that there are differences between them. Many hormones are elevated during the stress response. Three of them are norepinephrine, epinephrine, and cortisol. Norepinephrine and epinephrine are more commonly known as adrenaline. In response to a physical stressor, such as extremes in environmental temperature or stress induced by exercise, there is primarily an increase in norepinephrine. There is also a small increase in epinephrine. In response to a psychological or emotional stressor, there is also an increase in cortisol. To understand the effects of stress, we need to study the effects of each hormone that is secreted in response to a stressor. In general, norepinephrine has the greatest effect in increasing heart rate and blood pressure. Epinephrine has the greatest effect in releasing stored sugar. All of these actions tend to aid in preparation for vigorous physical activity. Cortisol acts to aid in preparation for vigorous physical activity, but it is also triggered by emotional stress. Unfortunately, one of its functions is to break down lean tissue for conversion to sugar as an additional source of energy. Cortisol also blocks the removal of certain acids in the bloodstream. When cortisol is elevated in the blood for prolonged periods of time, it causes ulcerations in the lining of the stomach because of increased acid formation. In addition, cortisol strains the brain’s cellular functioning, or, as one doctor explains, “it fries the brain.” Man, once...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345468910
ISBN 13 
9780345468918
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

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