Stress

Abstract

Stress is a feeling of being overwhelmed by events that you cannot seem to control. Stressors are events that cause stress, which can be extreme, uncontrollable and can often produce opposing tendencies. There are four varieties of stress, acute stress, episodic acute stress, traumatic stress and chronic stress. It should not be assumed that stress is always a bad thing. It keeps people motivated and can provide a great sense of achievement once the stressful situation has passed. However, too much stress can have negative impacts. Some people appear to be better at overcoming stressful events, or to view such events as challenges rather than as sources of stress. Worker stress refers to stress that occurs at work and affects work behavior. Strategies for dealing with stress in everyday life may not always be effective in dealing with workplace stress. A project manager must have knowledge about health and wellbeing at workplace such as stress in order to prevent it from becoming a major outbreak to the employees. Workplace stress that project managers need to deal with can be caused by both organizational and individual factors. The stressors in the work environment are the organizational sources, such as demands of performing a job, disagreements with coworkers, and organizational changes. Individual sources are the characteristics of the employee. Many techniques can help to manage stress at work and they can be divided into individual strategies and organizational strategies. Organizational strategies are implemented by organizations or managers with the goal to reduce stress for people at the workplace. Individual strategies are used by employees to reduce or eliminate personal stress.

What is stress?

Stress is a subjective feeling caused by threatening or uncontrollable events. It is critical to recognize that stress does not exist in the situation, it rather exists in how people respond to a specific situation. Hence, when you are stressed, you perceive that the demands of the situation are greater than your ability to deal with them. Your subjective perception of your ability to deal with a given situation may be significantly different from your objective abilities. Stress can have both negative and positive aspects, although it is often seen as an unpleasant state. Negative stress is known as distress, and positive stress is known as eustress.

People are likely familiar with both physiological and psycological reactions to stress. Signs of arousal, such as increased heart rates and respiratory rates, elevated blood pressure, and sweating, are all physiological responses to stress. Anxiety, fear, frustration, and despair are all psychological reactions to distress (negative stress), as are appraising or evaluating the stressful event and its impact, thinking about the stressful experience, and mentally preparing to take steps to try to deal with the stress.

In order for a person to experience stress, two cognitive events must occur. The first is the primary appraisal, which occurs when a person perceives an event to be a threat to his or her personal goals. The second cognitive event is called secondary appraisal and is when a person concludes that he or she lacks the resources to deal with the demands of the threatening event. Stress is not evoked if either of these appraisals is absent.

Stressors

Stressors are events that cause stress. If an induvidual perceives an environmental event to be dangerous or threatening, it is called a stressor. Some attributes seem to be common with stressors. They are uncontrollable, beyond our ability to influence. Stressors are extreme, causing a state of feeling overloaded or owerwhelmed to the point where one simply cannot take it any longer. Finally, stressors can often produce opposing tendencies, such as wanting and not wanting an activity or object, for example wanting to do a task but also wanting to put it off as long as possible.

People respond to stressors in different ways, some people seem better able to cope and to get over stressful events. The same event can happen to two people, but one is completely overwhelmed and devastated, whereas the other accepts it as a challenge and is motivated into positive action. Differences in how people respond to the same event are possible because stress is in the subjective reaction of the person to potential stressors. We all perceive demands and pressures differently, and we all have different resources or coping skills, which is also referred to as resilience.

Varieties of Stress

Stress is classified into four types by psychologists.

• Acute stress: This type of stress is caused by the sudden onset of demands and is experienced as tension headaches, emotional upsets, gastrointestinal disturbances, feelings of agitation and pressure. Most people associate the term stress with acute stress.
• Episodic acute stress: This type of stress refers to repeated episodes of acute stress so it is more serious. Episodic acute stress can lead to migraines, hypertension, stroke, anxiety, depression or serious gastrointestinal distress.
• Traumatic stress: Refers to a particularly severe case of acute stress, the consequences of which might last for years or even a lifetime. The symptoms with the stress response of traumatic stress is called post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. These symptoms are mainly what makes traumatic stress different from acute stress.
• Chronic stress: Another serious form of stress and it refers to stress that does not end. Chronic stress wears us down day after day until our resistance is gone. Chronic stress can lead to serious systemic illness, such as diabetes, decreased immune system functioning or cardiovascular disease.

Worker stress

[[File:PerformanceStressRelationship.png|400px|thumb|right|alt=Relationship between performance and stress.|Figure 1: Relationship between performance and stress. Adapted from x (2006), page 5.