Stress

Stress can be defined as the sum of physical and mental responses to an unacceptable disparity between real or imagined personal experience and personal expectations. By this definition, stress is a response which includes both physical and mental components.

Mental responses to stress include adaptive stress, anxiety, and depression. Where stress enhances function it may be considered good stress. However, if stress persists and is of excessive degree, it eventually leads to a need for resolution, which may lead either to anxious or depressive behavior.

One may further appreciate from that definition that stress may derive from imagined experiences such as frightening movies. Further, the fulcrum of stress response is the presence of disparity between experience and personal expectations. A person living in a fashion consistent with personally-accepted expectations has no stress even if the conditions might be interpreted as adverse from some outside perspective — rural people may live in comparative poverty, and yet be unstressed if there is a sufficiency according to their expectations. Finally, when there is chronic disparity between experience and expectations, stress may be relieved by acceptance. However, since acceptance is rarely complete except in children, stress resolution by this approach is also rarely complete. It has been said that stress is often a reaction to a crisis of predictability, that the mind is solely an instrument of prediction, and that the body may be divided into a vegetative process and an integrative process.

...More at Wikipedia 

Related Links:

• American Institute of Stress
• US National Library of Medicine

Recent Hope Cube Blog Entries For Stress

• mi familia Fri, June 13, 2008 - [view]
  
• Mother is always a bitch! Mon, April 21, 2008 - [view]
  I feel so stressed. My mom isn't what I need right now. When she gets angry, it will increase her chances of getting a heart attack, which I do not want her to get. Yet sometimes, she really tests me, sometimes I wish she can hear what I really have to say about her mothering skills. I don't appreciate her talling me that I am stupid. I really don't like it at all. When she told me today that it was all my fault, well I stepped out of her way and took a shower. Her telling me that was unecessary and it makes me feel that I should move out of the apartment. I want to. I can do it. But I am in a lot of mixed up emotions as it is that I don't know I can keep my own place. I don't want anything fancy I just want something I can call my own place. First, I need a job and ...
• Strees? Thu, April 10, 2008 - [view]
  My headaches are not going away. I stopped drinking coffee since last week and I've been sleeping ok (5hrs- it's still a work in progress). But I guess that isn't enough; nothing is. I feel so hopeless. 
• Over and out of order Mon, March 31, 2008 - [view]
  I am so nervous. Earlier today, this morning I just couldn't sleep and I was having short breaths. I feel so out of order and a little lost. The feeling of not being able to sustain control. Very anxious, which is normal before a speech. But having my issues, I don't now how much of this anxiety is normal. I want to have control over this but some of it is out of my hands. I get frustrated because I want to know that all that suppose to happen is going to happen, my speech is going to be alright and that all I have to do is work on my other homework. I can't help to feel like I am going to get a phone call from home, something bad. "Mom is in the hospital" or "Dad just had a stroke", it would definitely drop all my school work and ask for a ride home...
• at the heart of it all Thu, March 27, 2008 - [view]
  I feel like shit. I feel like I can't do anything. I am trying to get through the day but it seems like something is stopping me and all I can think of is me. The person that won't let me do anything. I guess it's the negative thing when I say that I am the on that is keeping myself back. I feel nervous. I feel like I am going to snap!