‘Fight-or-flight’
Stress is stressful!
What is stress?
Stress is a survival mechanism. When danger appears stress can get humans out of trouble quickly. Your body cranks up the gears and throws all its resources into getting you moving. Your heart pumps furiously to increase blood pressure, glucose is sent to the muscles as a fuel injection, and you become totally focussed on what psychologists’ call ‘fight-or-flight’. Stress was extremely useful for primitive humans but for 21st century humans it is a bit different. Feeling some amount of stress is normal but not all stress is bad. In the short-term stress can be helpful in keeping you motivated for a goal you have or keeping you alert. It is extremely common to be overwhelmed or stressed about something. Stress is something that everyone has experienced in their life.
Have you ever felt like you have so much going on and you’re not sure if you’ll be able to handle it all? This is called being overwhelmed or stressed. Stress happens when:
Most common stressors for children and teenagers are:
How can it affect you?
Stress can affect your body, mind, feelings and behaviours. You can experience things like:
Heart pounding
If these happens too often it can sometimes make you feel ill and forgetful. This will disturb your concentration on things that need to get done. When feeling anxious the mind will tend to focus on the negative things about situations. You may feel:
These feelings change your behaviour when going through something stressful. This will also affect sleeping and eating habits along with avoiding people or work you need to do.
What sort of things stress you out and how do you deal with them?
It is important to know what your stressors are so that you can come up with helpful ways to cope with them when they occur.
Helpful ways to cope with stress. Here are 6 ways to overcome stress:
Find out what works for you, take a break and stress less.
TP
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