So, yes. Each thing that we do, most of the time has put us in stress. At this moment, when you’re reading this post, since it contradicts what you’ve known, may put you in stress. Getting to work place or school, and caught in a heavy traffic jam, gave you stress in thinking what will your boss or teacher says to you when you arrive later.
Now, in discussing on stress, we should note that there’s 2 type of stressors or things that motivate and cause stress. They are known as the Environmental Stressor and Psychological Sterssor.
It is all obvious isn’t it.
Environmental Stressor are things that cause stress from the external surroundings. And we could further categorize this environmental stressor into 3 sections; the fatal events, the changes in life and the hassles or irritating events.
The fatal events covers the natural disasters such as the earthquake, tsunami, hurricane and flood, which certainly caused major life loss and other losses that cause stress in physiology or the victims.
Changes in life are the one which could either bring positive outcome or negative outcome, depending on how we look at time. Example, if a single parent is about to get married again, his or her children may sees it as an opportunity to now have a mum or dad or the children could look it as and disadvantage as now they need to fight for their biological parent attention and love with the future new family members in their life.
And the last emotional stressors, the hassles that we encounter in our life. For example, we could be an impatient person and when we are forced to queue in the bank or our newly bought iphone fell into a drain.
Psychological stressor are the aspect that covers the Frustration, Pressure, Conflicts, and Uncontrollability.
Frustration and Pressure are what we known in our everyday use. Conflicts on the other hand, have 3 forms.
• approach – approach conflict (eg. deciding on things that give both pros. such as either go holiday to A or job B)
• approach – avoidance conflict (eg. deciding on things that has 1 cons and 1 pros)
• avoidance – avoidance conflict (eg. to make decision that both option caused cons)
Uncontrollability refer to things that is out of our control to handle such as death of family members, and the increase of goods’ price in the market.
So, now can we agree that we do experience stressor in our life. How we look at stressor have put us either to be ‘stress’ for it or we are just ‘cool’ with it.
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Reference: Introduction to Psychology (LSP 101/05), Unit 5, WOU, pg 3-6
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note:
This is for just for my study for the finals :)
