When it comes to the word stress, I believe everyone is familiar with it. Stress exists in each of us, and many people will have the experience of being stressed. But is stress a bad thing? Not necessarily, although the best life is one that is stress-free and can be lived easily. But if you live too relaxed and without a sense of purpose, you will actually become unable to move forward. Therefore, don’t regard stress as a completely bad existence. Instead, first learn to understand what will happen to you under pressure, which is good and which is bad, and then learn how to deal with various pressures flexibly.

Acute Stress vs Chronic Stress

Stress is generally divided into two types: chronic stress and acute stress. Acute stress can last from a few minutes to a few hours. Chronic stress, on the other hand, can last for days or months. If we face acute stress, what kind of experience will it bring to our body and mind?

First of all, it can be seen that acute stress lasts for a short time. Short-term acute stress will cause the human body to activate defense mode and produce “interleukins” to automatically regulate the body’s immune system. In other words, because the sudden attack of acute stress triggers the defense mode, to cope with the stress, the human body needs to temporarily enhance immunity to resist the stress. This allows our bodies to better fight disease and reduce inflammation.

Appropriate acute stress can also make us more attentive when facing problems. It can make people highly awake and highly concentrated in work or study and can improve creativity more efficiently. But at the same time, sudden stress can also cause physical discomfort: for example, a sudden surge of adrenaline can cause blood pressure and heart rate to rise faster, insufficient blood supply to the gastric system, gastric bloating, etc.

Of course, these are all short-lived, but what gives us more headaches is actually “chronic stress”. So how does chronic stress develop? When acute stress occurs, if the things that bother us are not resolved in a short period, acute stress will become chronic stress that accompanies life for a long time. What damages our physical and mental health is chronic stress.

Studies have shown that when people are under long-term stress that is not urgent but long-lasting, the HPA axis in the brain, that is, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal gland, will lose balance, resulting in the inability to inhibit the release of hormones, which will make us highly sensitive for a long time. High arousal preparedness state.

What is the HPA axis? It is an important part of the neuroendocrine system, involved in controlling responses to stress, and regulating many body activities such as digestion, the immune system, mood and emotion, and energy store depletion. When these regulatory and coordination functions are imbalanced, many adverse reactions will occur, such as: decreased immunity, poor memory and cognitive ability, loss of emotional control, and a series of negative problems such as aging more easily.

As a result, the whole person will look depressed, tired, anxious, often procrastinate, inexplicably resist all positive behaviors, be pessimistic, and tend to be irritable when getting along with others. Moreover, chronic stress can create a vicious cycle of continuing to experience negative stress.

How to Differentiate between Chronic Stress and Acute Stress?

When acute stress comes, you can resist it and take some actions and behavioral responses to change your current situation, which is also a kind of growth. When chronic stress comes, you will choose to escape, thinking that you can’t bear it, and you will always be in a state of anxiety and depression, and you will keep complaining, why does this happen to me, why is life so difficult?

Moreover, when you are immersed in it, it will be difficult for you to make any positive response and you will fall into a state of learned helplessness.

Therefore, it is very simple to distinguish between these two types of pressure. It depends on a person’s attitude towards problems and how he lives.

Chronic stress, like fear, leaves a shadow in your mind, and the longer you hold back, the closer it gets to you. If you think about it, you will be trapped in it, constantly boosting its morale, and letting it slowly eat away at your courage and belief.

Acute stress can make people more focused and work harder when facing problems or difficulties. In other words, the sudden onset of stress can make us more active. You can think of the human body as a spring. Long-term chronic pressure will cause the spring to deform or even twist, but acute pressure will increase the elasticity of the spring.

Therefore, it can be seen that appropriate acute pressure allows one to act quickly when receiving a threat, enter a state of responding to the enemy, and use high mobility to eliminate uncertain external threats. If you can get used to solving problems when you find them and minimize anxiety, it will not be easy to turn into chronic stress and stay in your mind for rumination.

2 Tips to Help You Fight Stress

Change your perception, understand and evaluate emotions

• The most direct source of stress is through emotions. The path that causes stress is generally that one feels an external threat and imagines it catastrophically, thus feeling anxious mentally.
• The creation of stress all comes from our mind. In other words, what scares us is not the problem itself, but our inner mind that constantly processes the problem.
• Therefore, the next time you are under pressure and have various negative emotions, don’t rush to avoid it and magnify it. Instead, look at it calmly first, allowing the body to proactively acknowledge the existence of stress. Pausing can allow the body to recognize its existence more clearly and avoid over-processing it vaguely.
• When you can see the voice behind stress and not over-interpret the situations that cause stress, you are changing your perception of stress. When we don’t fight stress, but see it as a positive, way to quickly promote our growth, we can reduce our negative reactions to stress. This will also improve our positive attitude and ability to handle things under pressure.

Detach yourself and see things from their perspective

• Most people have idols they admire, or people they admire very much. They are often the goals you want to be and the direction you strive for. When pressure comes, you assume how they would deal with the problem again and think about what they would think and do.
• There is an interesting study: If a five-year-old child is faced with something that he cannot solve, and he consciously thinks about what Batman would do in this scenario, he will become more confident and solve the problem. You will also become more effective when dealing with problems.
• Therefore, if you have an idol who is wiser than yourself, you can substitute yourself when you encounter a difficult situation. Doing this can help us escape from emotional distress and keep our minds clear.
• Or, we can extend the time longer and see how you will view this issue ten years from now. In life, most of the time what traps us is not the problem, but the mentality and perspective when facing the problem.
• But when we step away from our role, look at the problem from a higher perspective, and examine it with an outsider’s mentality, we may not be so stressed.

Conclusion

Kelly, a psychologist at Stanford University in the United States, put forward a point of view that subverts common cognition. She believes: “The happiest people are not people without stress. On the contrary, they are those who are under a lot of stress but can regard stress as their friends.” This kind of pressure is the driving force in life and makes our life more meaningful.”

Therefore, it is also a good choice to learn to turn pressure into motivation, leverage your strength, and ride the wind and waves. There is a concept in psychology called “allow”.

When we can face the world with an attitude of permission and acceptance, we will have more certainty and peace in the face of uncertainty. Therefore, when facing pressure, you must know how to relax your mind, take things lightly, and tolerate the hardships of all things, to help your life go smoothly.