Blog #1, Ch. 12

Chapter 12 focuses primarily on what stress is and how people tend to perceive and deal with it. It shows how the ways we react and cope with stress can have dramatic effects on our physical as well as psychological health. The chapter also goes on to debunk some popular beliefs about stress, as well as giving us a brief overview of life changes that can significantly reduce the stress we feel in everyday life.
One of the more interesting subjects that the chapter covered was the GAC or (General Adaptation Syndrome), created by Dr. Hans Selye. Dr. Selye's work tells us that the human body goes through three different stages of reaction when introduced to a stressor, the three stages being "alarm, resistance, and finally exhaustion". The doctor's work tells us how our physiological responses help us deal with stress as initially we are pumped full of adrenaline by our hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. Once our thinking brain realizes that we are probably overreacting, our basal ganglia begins to take over and makes us act more rationally then our initial impulses would have us do. Finally, if we are exposed the stress/stressors for too long a time and our coping mechanisms breakdown, the body itself may actually begin to fail.
Overall I found this to be quite an interesting chapter that made me question my natural assumptions about stress and dealing with it. I can only hope that the rest of the text will be as fun to read as chapter twelve was.