Obviously the title gives away what much of this chapter is about. Stress is a great topic to dig into because most people can relate to it, especially students, myself included. The chapter covers the whole gambit of the stress factory. It covers what stress is, including causes as well as a handy guide/rating, which I have seen used numerous times to rate and monitor stress. It is a handy sheet to use when dealing with huge or numerous conflicts. It helps keep things in perspective. I think as a society we tend to push ourselves to ignore or move through things instead of accepting and allowing time to heal or even process. This chart helps solidify a kind of validation.
However, obviously different people handle stress in a variety of different ways and some things that are stressful to some are not to others. That chart does not help as much with that, but does give you a general idea, while the chapter goes on to explain all the levels of diversity and deviation in stress responses.
The chapter also covers all the ways that our bodies take on stress. Again, as a rather emotionally suppressed society, it can all too often be ignored that what we are suppressing is actually harmful and that even though it might not feel like it, actually feeling our emotions can be a lit healthier than ignoring them or letting them build up.
This was encouraging to see because many people believe that the high levels of stress seen today is actually becoming a chronic condition, similar to diabetes, the brain can basically o.d. on stress and can no longer process it correctly. This can result in a number of health problems, both mental and physical.
The chapter wraps up with solutions to coping and promoting a more stress free life style, which did not include funny things like this:
but did have some basic (and nonbasic) things that we intuitively know but don't often do...or do literally, like this:
don't we all wish it was as easy as installing a vent in your brain?
Thanks for the great summary! I was interested in reading your post because, with midterms coming up soon, I was hoping to find a quick summary of the psychology behind all the stress I (and most students at the U) might be feeling at about this time. I agree with a lot of the points made, especially the idea of letting emotions and stress out as opposed to keeping them bottled in. I think most of us can agree that it's important to find healthy ways to relieve stress, and, while I'd never heard of the handy chart you wrote about, I think it's a neat idea. It's definitely true that things can get so overwhelming sometimes when we forget to put things in perspective. One thing I learned that I didn't know before but found pretty interesting is the notion of stress becoming a chronic condition-- a disease, if you will. Are people born with this condition? How does it work? I'm curious to find out.