Under Pressure

With deadlines for coursework and exams approaching quickly, I highly doubt that I'm the only one who's feeling a bit tightly strung. Stress is something which we all experience at some point or another but why do we really feel such an emotional discomfort when we come under pressure? 

If we ask google it tells us that stress is ''a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances''. Which although true, is over complicating our question a little. Stress, when it comes down to it, is not an emotion. Stress is in fact a state of mine which results in an emotional response including but not limited to a mix of:

• Anxiety
• Sadness/Depression
• Trouble Concentrating
• Irritability
• Loss of appetite
• Memory troubles

So evidently stress is not a nice thing, nor a good thing, but what exactly is it? 

In a mechanical sense, stress is a physical force on an object, so considering that emotionally it feels very much like this, it is no big surprise that they are referred to by the same word. 

Our bodies run off a delicate equilibrium, a constant input and output of various things, the usual everyday routines and nothing that is very out of the ordinary most of the time. However when a condition in any equilibrium is changed, the equilibrium actually changes in favor of an opposing condition to attempt to restore this balance. This is exactly what stress is in a sense.

Stress is our body's response to change, our the effect of our various internal systems all working away rapidly to oppose a change. This also explains why such a wide variety of situations can cause stress, as anything which causes a drastic change or threatens to change our daily routine in future is in fact opposed by our own bodies. Through the emissions of various hormones or our brains refusing to stop working furiously to find a solution our bodies can cause us to feel run down and all sorts of emotional discomfort.

Having said that, is stress really a bad thing? Without stress we would not adapt to a new situation and would simply keep going the way we are. If we had no stress then we would not be prompted to adapt and survive. Potentially as a result of this humanity could have died out a very long time ago!

So there we have is, a quick evaluation of stress, like everything in the delicate equilibrium of life we need some to survive but when the balance gets upset it can lead to some pretty serious consequences. So next time you're feeling stressed out realise that you're feeling the emotion that's been driving us since the dawn of humanity, its pretty cool to think about :)

Thanks for reading guys I say this quite a lot but I appreciate it all, as I implied there are exams coming up and evidently I won't be posting so regularly for a while but I'll be sure to write when I can, see ya :)