Scott Colter - PSYCHOLOGY: Powerful techniques to overcome stress, anxiety and negative thinking

Stress is the sensation of being overwhelmed by responsibilities or pressure. As a psychological concept, stress was first introduced in the 1950's, with the term originally taken from physics, where it described the amount of tension placed upon an object.

The important part of the stress definition is feeling overwhelmed. Many people have huge levels of responsibility but nonetheless thrive in difficult or taxing situations. Stress is the distinct feeling of being pushed or pulled too thin and it doesn't directly correlate to the level of responsibility that you may have, although responsibility and pressure are often factors.

Stress has a huge range of symptoms. It is known that it can increase blood pressure and heart rate, affect sleeping patterns, produce a loss of appetite, destroy concentration and contribute to a wide range of mental illnesses, such as depression.

When a person feels a sensation of stress, the body's hormonal system kicks into action. The nervous system releases a cocktail of hormones, most notably cortisol, which collectively trigger the 'flight or fight' response.

To simplify, the flight or fight response is an evolution adaptation that prepares the body to either combat a threat ('fight') or run away ('flight'). Ultimately this causes the heart rate to increase, the breath to become faster as well as a redirection of blood flow towards the muscles. More severe effects include shaking, loss of peripheral vision and the constriction of blood vessels. All of these responses are intended to prime the body for dealing with threats or challenges.

Whilst the fight or flight system is a fantastic adaptation that helped our ancestors cope with a harsh and dangerous world, it causes us a range of problems in modern society.

The vast majority of us are not going to need to fight to the death or run away from an apex predator when we experience a stressor. Rather our challenges are commonplace but chronic; a lack of money, workplace issues, interpersonal relationship strains, other desires and aspirations, etc.

The issue is that our flight and fight response can trigger in reaction to these mundane, but non-life threatening issues. If this response triggers too frequently, a high amount of flight & fight hormones are released, especially cortisol, into the body, producing the psychological sensation of stress.

Once you begin to understand that stress is a response , the methods in which stress can be tackled start to become clear recognize what is causing the stress response and manage that.

Anything that causes a stress response is called a stressor. The crucial part of stressors is that they can be divided into physiological stressors and psychological stressors.

Physiological stressors are events that directly put pressure upon the body, such as injury or extreme environmental temperatures.

Psychological stressors, however, are any events that are perceived as threatening or challenging. Depending upon the individual, this may include genuinely dangerous events (such as being mugged or attacked) to events that are actually harmless (such as an offhand comment interpreted negatively).

Therefore to manage stress, you need to analyze both your proximity to stressors and your perception of them. It may be the case that you have too many stressors within your life, in which case you need to cut back on events that are causing you stress.

However, it may be that you are interpreting too many manageable events as stressors, in which case you need to alter the ways you are perceiving these events.

Additionally, stress can also be managed by adopting a healthier lifestyle, which can manage the physiological causes and symptoms of stress. Let us walk through each of these solutions to stress in turn.