Stress Management

Abstract

Early models of stress considered it to arise from our environment, and to impact on us all equally. Holmes and Rahe1 established a hierarchy of severity for various stressors. They also attempted to provide a link between stress and health, suggesting that the more stressful life events an individual experiences, the more their risk of ill-health. Unfortunately, this hypothesis was rarely substantiated. What has emerged from subsequent research is that the impact of potentially stressful events is mediated by our psychological responses to those events. The meaning attributed to events, and the coping responses we use, profoundly influence our emotional and behavioral responses to them. Accordingly, more recent models of stress consider stress to have a number of components: a cognitive response (“I am worried I won’t cope with this problem”), a physiological component usually involving increased autonomic arousal, a behavioral element involving more or less useful coping responses, and an emotional experience involving a variety of negative emotional states such as anger or anxiety (Figure 34-1).