Three components of stress

I have never thought about stress having different parts; I have always thought about stress as this massive black cloud that makes thinking straight and smiling a very hard thing to do. Dr. Mate breaks this cloud into three components:

Stressor - physical or emotional event that an organism interprets as threatening.

Processing system - the nervous system (brain)

Stress response - physiological and behavioral reactions to a perceived threat.

I found this interesting because I believe that we can control our stress response to a certain point, but how far is that point? Because sometimes I try and not stress about something because there is no benefit to stressing about this stressor, though then I stress about the damage I am doing to my body because I am stressing too much. It is like an on-going cycle that few understand how to control. Of course there are methods, such as yoga, going for a run, meditating, but what if I don't have time or don't know how to get involved with those things? Well, I think the next time I am stressed about something I will think about it as a challenge - a challenge to overcome this threat. Maybe there is no right way to overcome stress, maybe everyone needs to figure out their own way to dealing with it and believe that their way is going to work.

Dr. Mate tells a story of how one of his patients, Alan, deals with his diagnoses of cancer. Alan believes that his "bad stress" is what caused the cancer in his esophagus and stomach. He is frustrated with his 10-year marriage and blames his wife's inability to be romantic and intimate to be the cause - "her problems were at their absolute peak at the point I got cancer." I do not believe that his wife was the absolute cause of his cancer, but I do believe that it made his condition worse. Maybe if he had been able to have a closer relationship with his wife, he might have told her that he has been suffering indigestion and heartburn for a long time. Heartburn is caused by chronic reflux, which results in a faulty esophageal sphincter. It is also a fact that excessive acid production due to stress and disordered neural input from the autonomic nervous sytem also play a role in reflux. Therefore, the more stressed Alan was, the more acid was being produced, and the more chronic reflux he experienced.

To learn more about how to deal with stress:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/