What is stress and stress management techniques

Everyone needs to know the stress management techniques as we all experience stress sometimes. What causes stress for you may not be stressful for someone else, such as driving a car.
What is stress?
The word 'stress' is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "a state of affair involving demand on physical or mental energy"
Stress is what you feel when you have to handle more than what you are used to.
Stress is the "wear and tear" our bodies experience as we adjust to our continually changing environment; it has physical and emotional effects on us and can create positive or negative feelings. As a positive influence, stress can help compel us to action; it can encourage you to meet a deadline or get things done,such as winning a race. As a negative influence, long-term stress can increase the risk of diseases like depression, heart disease and a variety of other problems. By understanding ourselves and our reactions to stress-provoking situations, we can learn to handle stress more effectively.

When you are stressed, your body responds as though you are in danger
Situation and releases stress harmones.As a result, your heart speed up; your breath becomes faster and shallow & more energy is released so as to prepare you either to fight or quickly run away from the scene. This is called fight or flight response, which is good if the threat is a physical one as our ancestors in cave age period faced. But this is a bad thing if the stress is a result of some emotional thing as the extra energy released will not have any outlet. Our body can not differentiate whether the threat is physical or emotional. Instead of leveling off after the crisis is over, your stress harmones, heart rate and blood pressure remain high, ruining your health. The prolonged exposure to stress,results in serious problems including heart diseases.
An important goal for those under stress is the management of life stresses. Elimination of stress is unrealistic, since stress is a part of normal life. Stress in moderate level, adds spice to our life without which life will be bored. It’s impossible to completely eliminate stress, and it would not be advisable to do so. Instead, we can learn to manage stress so that we have control over our stress and its effects on our physical and mental health.

In this blog we will explore the causes, symptoms and effects of stress and the various management techniques so as to help you to develop your effective stress management strategy, which will reduce your stress and make your life positive and productive.