What is Stress, And Why Are People Confused About It?

Understanding the relationship between stress and cardiovascular disease isn't easy. Is Type-A behavior unhealthy? Does stress cause your blood pressure to rise? Can stress cause you to have a heart attack? While differing opinions exist about these and other issues, research has shown that stress does play a role in many cardiovascular disorders.

Here's What We Know
While our knowledge about stress and cardiovascular diseases is incomplete, most experts agree on the following points:

Stress does contribute to heart disease in certain individuals.
Stress also contributes to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other cardiac risk factors (e.g. smoking, overweight, etc.) in many individuals.
Whether or not stress caused your illness to occur, suffering a heart attack or other cardiac condition is itself quite stressful for most individuals and their families.
Thus, if you've recently had a heart attack, stroke, or other cardiovascular condition, it is reasonable to assume that: 1) stress may have played a role in causing your illness to occur; and 2) even if it didn't, you and your family can still benefit from learning how to deal with stress more effectively.
What Is Stress, And Why Are People Confused About It?
In recent years, several definitions of human stress have been proposed. These definitions differ, however, causing a great deal of confusion.

One way you can avoid this confusion is to always remember that "stress" is just a word! It is merely a term human beings use to stand for hundreds of specific problems in our lives.

When we are feeling angry, frustrated, worried or depressed, for example, we often say we are "stressed." When we have too many pressures, responsibilities, or work-related demands, we also use the very same term. We also use the word "stress" to refer to a wide range of physical problems and symptoms that occur within our bodies. Thus, whenever we say we are suffering from "stress," what we really mean is we are having problems or conflicts--emotional, physical, financial, etc.-- that are painful or troubling to us.

By the same token, when people say, "I don't have any stress," they have merely forgotten that "stress" is just a word. If you ask instead if they ever have problems in their lives, most people would admit that they frequently do.

Strategies For Coping With Stress
There are three basic strategies for coping with stress (other than ignoring or denying your problems). These are:

The Band-Aid Approach - using alcohol, drugs (prescription or illegal), cigarettes, food, sex, or anything else to temporarily relieve the symptoms of "stress." While these coping strategies "work" in the short-run, they have harmful long-term effects, which make them undesirable.

The Stress Management Approach - using diet, exercise, meditation, biofeedback, or other relaxation exercises to cope with your "stress." While these coping strategies have definite advantages over band-aid methods, they still focus mainly on just the symptoms of your problems.

The Ideal Approach - making stress disappear, quickly and naturally, by modifying or correcting its underlying causes. While this is by far the best way to deal with problems in life, most people fail to use this approach because they incorrectly understand what causes their stress to occur.
In recent years, new insights about the causes of human stress have emerged. These new insights focus on the difference between obvious and non-obvious causes. Obvious causes of stress include the things that happen to us and around us--i.e. the things we easily see. Non-obvious causes include conversations and behavior patterns that become triggered within our bodies. These include expectations, judgments, evaluations, needs for control, needs for approval, and many others.

The more you learn to recognize and deal with these non-obvious causes of your problems, the less stress, tension, and physical ailments you will likely experience.