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5 Strategies for ADDed Effectiveness on the Job
© Copyright 2004 For many people with ADD, work life can be difficult. If your working environment is not ADD-friendly, then you may find yourself feeling chronically disorganized and stressed out at work. Whether or not you choose to share your...
As The Primary Care Giver for an Alzheimer’s Patient, How Can I Get a Break?
Taking care of a loved one who has Alzheimer’s is a huge responsibility and very time consuming. It can bring a lot of stress, frustration and more. You devote all your time to your loved one and not have time for yourself anymore. You always...
Change Your Attitude About Exercise
Although exercise is one of the most powerful tools available for improving health and managing weight, even the word “exercise” can conjure up negative thoughts and feelings. If you are not very active or not exercising regularly, perhaps you have...
New CDs Help to Relieve Stress and Promote Deep Meditative States Within Minutes
LOVINGSTON, Va., April 13 /Xpress Press/ -- For many people, stress is a fact of life. To alleviate its aggravating symptoms, growing numbers of people are turning to meditation as a way to quiet the mind, replenish the spirit, and allow the body...
Top 5 Stress Relief Methods You Can Use
Some time ago it didn't seem such a big issue that the big boss yelled at his employees everyday. Workers from all categories, after receiving a powerful dose of stress at the workplace, used to come home and have a hard time dealing with their...
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Stress Research the Fight-or-Flight Response
In 1932, Walter Cannon offered some of the earliest research on stress and established the theory of the "fight-or-flight" response. His work proved that when an organism experiences a shock or perceives a threat, it reacts instantly by releasing hormones that help it to survive.
In human beings and other animals, these hormones allow for greater speed and strength. Heart rate and blood pressure increases, delivering more oxygen and blood sugar to support major muscles.
Sweating increases to better cool the muscles and allowing them to remain efficient. Blood is regulated to reduce blood loss if there is any damaged. Hormones focus our attention on the threat, to the exclusion of everything else. All of this commands a heightened ability to survive life-threatening events.
We can also trigger this same reaction when faced with something unexpected or something that frustrates our goals. If the threat is small, our response will be likewise, we may not notice the stressor among the many other distractions of a stressful day.
This mobilization of the body to
spring into survival mode also has negative consequences. We become excitable, anxious, jumpy and irritable. This state can reduce our ability to be most effective. With shakiness and a pounding heart, we can find it difficult to carry out controlled skills.
The intensity of our focus on survival takes from our ability to draw information from many sources. We can find that we are more accident-prone and less able to make good decisions.
To be most productive, our day-by-day lives require a calm, rational, controlled and socially sensitive approach.
We need to be able to control our fight-or-flight response; otherwise, we can have problems later on such as poor health and burnout.
About the author:
Mike Lindsey runs the health site, Healthy News. For information on stress management and stress relief please visit the site.
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