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Every day millions of women mention the word "stress" – "I am stressed!", "What a stressful situation", "Don’t push me, I am already too stressed”, "I cannot take more stresses”, etc.
Do we know what a stress is and what causes stress? - it can be quite difficult to answer this question due to the varying nature of women, different things causes stress to different women with absolutely different sensitivity to stressors (factor triggering your stress). Generally speaking stress is when times get hard and things become what they are not meant to be we get stressed. Actually the stress occurs when we are unable to cope with pressure. But stress not always brought by negative things and/or unpleasant events - sometimes very happy things or events (marriage, happy pregnancy, finish of school or university) could cause a stress.
It is important to mention that some event could trigger stress in one woman but for another woman it could be absolutely normal situation. At the same time, many different things can cause stress - physical, mental, emotional, internal, external, etc.
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Some common causes of stress include financial problems, job worries and/or conflicts, complicated relationships, death of a loved one, family problems, exams and/or tests. Sometimes, there are no clear causes of stress – some women just feel more frustrated, anxious or depressed than others, which can cause them to feel stressed more often. And how to clarify what causes stress?
Different scientists recommend several types of classifications for stress causes.
According to Mountain State Centers for Independent Living the stress causes could be identified as the following:
 Survival Stress
Survival stress is also known as "fight or flight" response - this is a common response to danger in all people and animals. When you experience the physical threat, your body responds with a burst of energy so that you will be better able to survive the dangerous situation (“fight”) or escape it all together (“flight”). This is the typical survival stress.
Internal Stress
Internal stress is something happening inside you – you are worried about real and/or imaginary things. Internal stress is when people make themselves stressed. Many women are “addicted” to internal stress by inventing imagined stress factors which often correlate with their own lifestyle, life history, negative life experiences, etc. In most cases those types of women look for stressful situations and feel stress about things that aren't stressful.
Environmental Stress
Usually environmental stress is a response to several on-going factors around person that cause stress, such as noise, crowd, loud music, bad weather, complicated relations, pressure from work or family. Environmental stress factors are very difficult to deal with and solutions should be found in good relations and being tolerant to surrounding factors.
Fatigue and Overwork
This is one of common types of stress – on-going work overload, working too much or too hard in the office, school, university, sport club or at home. In some cases the real reason for that type of stress in bad time management and/or absence of reasonable plans. This can be one of the hardest kinds of stress to avoid because many women feel this is out of their control.
There is another classification of what causes stress:
Threat
Threat could be physical, social, financial, mental, emotional, etc. Any type of threat could be a cause for stress.
Fear
Fear could be secondary cause for stress as threat can lead to fear, which again leads to stress. As women are very different with different nervous system and different life problems, fear also could be different. Usually fear leads to imagined outcomes, which are the real source of stress.
Uncertainty
When you are not certain, you could afraid of many things – when you cannot control the situation and/or imagine the uncertainty, it could provoke fear and threat. The whole situation could trigger stress.
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is very special situation which is connected with our feelings. When there is a gap between what we do and what we think, then we experience cognitive dissonance, which is felt as stress. Very often we try to be nice and do things which supposed to have positive result but sometimes our positive efforts end up with unexpected negative result and/or negative reaction of people – this is when we experience dissonance and stress.
We could experience cognitive dissonance also if we cannot fulfill our promises and/or commitments. There could be unexpected circumstances or obstacles which prevent us to implement promises and in our mind we become “bad and not honest person” - this is when we also experience cognitive dissonance and stress.
Life causes
Life causes of stress could be very different and could include death of loved ones, health problems, crime situations, different type of abuse, problematic relations, family problems, fights, financial problems, work complications, different kind of threat in schools, etc.
WHAT CAUSES STRESS - STRESS EVALUATION
In 1967 two psychiatrists Dr Thomas Holmes and Dr Richard Rahe decided to study stress causes and to evaluate whether or not stress contributes to illness. Dr Holmes and Dr Rahe surveyed more than 5000 medical patients and asked them to say whether they had experience any of a series of 43 life events in the previous two years - each event was called “Life Change Unit (LCU)”. Each LCU had different level of threat – different "weight" for stress.
Based on all survey results Dr Holmes and Dr Rahe developed the very special “Stress Scale” which is presently used by all medical professional for stress evaluation – for discovering the possibility of stress from different LCUs.
For adults to measure stress according to Dr Holmes and Dr Rahe “Stress Scale”, the number of LCU that apply to events in the past year of an individual's life are added and the final score will give a rough estimate of how stress affects health.
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Score of 300+: At risk of illness.
Score of 150-299+: Risk of illness is moderate (reduced by 30% from the above risk).
Score 150-: Person has a slight risk of illness.
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10 Days to Stress Free Life
The Art of Stress Free Life
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