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A Brief Desription of Stress

Stress can be defined as the actual experience we have as the result of being out of control of any given situation. Generally people consider stress as a modern-day phenomenon caused by the demands of today�s society. In some respects this is true but only inasmuch as modern society does not allow us to get �it� out of our systems. If we were to go back in time to a land where there is constant threat from predators we might discover just how important stress reactions are. When any animal finds itself under threat it requires a physiological response that prepares the body to do one of two things: fight and destroy the threat or, run away and escape from it. Without such a mechanism to prepare itself for such action it would never have survived to pass on those same genes, which today are responsible for the nervous system that prepares the body for �fight� or �flight.�

In the correct proportion stress is positive and also necessary for achieving and performing to our maximum potential. However, like anything else in life, excess is damaging and may pile up upon us almost unobtrusively. It becomes a burden when we are unable to express it either through physical action or emotional expression or, even more importantly, not recognising its existence. Everyone, without exception, has a limit to the amount of stress they can effectively cope with. Stressors, that is, those things in our lives that create the stress, come in many forms and varieties. Some are more stressful than others and what is stressful for one individual may be less so for another. Even change can be stressful. Change requires the individual to adapt in some way to his or her world which itself can be a stress factor. Paradoxically lack of change can also be a stressor. The mind and the body require a healthy level of stress.

Signs and symptoms of stress are many. Ranging from extreme conditions such as cardiac failure - even cancer is said by some to be correlated with stress and personality factors - through a range of other symptoms such as depression; anxiety; addictions; aggressiveness; colitis; flatulence; memory failure, etc. There are also overt behaviours such as clenched fists; tensed muscles; blinking frequently; talking incessantly, etc. These can be linked to feeling bad-tempered or easily reduced to tears and hearing statements such as: �that�s not like me to ----!� A healthy approach to managing, or learning to handle stress, is to recognise that it not �something out there� so to speak, but more to do with how you perceive that �something� out there.
How you perceive it will determine whether it becomes a stressor or a situation to be resolved. One individual will perceive a given experience as perhaps challenging whilst another individual will perceive the experience as one that exceeds his or her coping ability

In addition to hypnosis it would be very useful to have a greater understanding of how your 'style' of thinking about certain situations can actually be an instegator of your panic attacks. You, I beleive, benifit from reading the follwing article: CBT