This may at first glance, seem a fairly obvious question with a fairly obvious answer that stress has an adverse or negative impact on an individual’s health, either physically or mentally.
Whilst this may seem true to most people, there is a slightly more underlying complex issue which concerns the nature of stress, its value as well as its detriment’s, and why an understanding of the nature of stress and how it should be handled can have a major impact on an individual’s health.
It is a fairly recent understanding in the field of holistic medicine that stress can have an impact on an individual’s health. Until fairly recently there was a belief that external factors had a relatively limited impact on an individual’s health, and it was largely how the individual handled their external environment that determined how they felt.
This in effect was saying that an individual should really be bullet-proof, and that with a few exceptions the external environment and the stresses of that environment had relatively little impact on an individual’s ability to function.
This belief has pretty much swung the other way nowadays, with an understanding that external environments that generate stress do have an impact, and there is a much healthier focus on either removing some of the levels of stress if possible, or on finding ways of helping an individual to cope with the nature of stress.
There is also an understanding that certain levels of stress can in fact be quite a good thing at times, partly because they generate a degree of motivation and impetus within an individual to change and do things and move their lives forward in ways that they might not do otherwise.
The whole focus of an individual maintaining their own sense of health promotion by understanding their health and what works for and against them as an individual becomes more of an imperative with the rising costs of health insurance and health care, and the onus that puts on an individual to take responsibility for their own health and the factors that affect it.
The issue of stress should perhaps be clarified by splitting it into two main areas, the external motivators of stress and the internal motivators of stress. This in part is important because it clarifies areas of life that an individual is in control of, and clarifies areas of life that an individual is not in control of.
Once an individual is clear, or clearer about what they are in control of in their life then they have a sense of purpose about being able to change the things they can. Often external stress such as work pressures, travel/commute pressures and family pressures are often seen as being outside the control of the individual, and as such represent a greater level of stress because they are powerless to affect the outcome.
Peter Main
