Stress In The Workplace

Often called the fight or flight reflex, stress has been known to save people’s lives, whether it be on a battlefield or some dangerous situation back home. Too much stress ultimately leads to health problems, but too little stress isn’t good for us either. When we go too long without a sharp stimulating response, the body loses its ability to handle stress properly (Tom Scheve, 2009). Somewhere between too much, and too little stress can actually be good for you, helping you perform under pressure. It is when someone cannot turn off that fight or flight feeling that it begins to show its negative effects.

Stress is a natural human response that prompts us to address problems and situations. When under stress, your hormones are released and your body goes into a fight or flight response. You begin to sweat more, your heart rate and blood pressure increase, and your muscles tense. This is why stress is so detrimental to our health. Especially for African Americans, who are already at high risk for high blood pressure given that it's part of genetics.

According to National Institute of Health, stress is an internal state that people experience as they encounter changes throughout their lives. III. I have learned about the effects of stress due to my personal experience such as dealing with depression, weight gain, and being antisocial. IV. Today I will explain the physical, mental, and emotional effects of stress.

The reason why these can be regarded as determinants of his health is because stress induces a pro-inflammatory response and involvement of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis [11]. A person’s employment and working conditions can therefore increase the vulnerability of an individual to becoming ill, such as Mr W.’s precarious employment. Precarious employment is considered as employment insecurity, with low wages and economic derivation as well as restricted social rights [12]. Research into its impacts have revealed that such types of employment have a stress related pathway to ill health and poor self-reported health [12], with mental health being reported as the most susceptible and responsive health outcome associated with this determinant

CHAPTER 01 INTRODUCTION 1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY Individuals have always been an important part of any organizational structure, i.e. sole proprietorship, partnership, or the company. Hence it is equally important that the services of the human capital should be utilized in such a manner that brings the maximum output. Since on one side it seems necessary to compensate the employees according to their skills & efforts, it’s also necessary to keep them away from the stress on the work place as much as possible. Stress is a condition of strain that has a direct behavior on emotions, idea process and material conditions of a person.

The more you have stress; the most likely you will get high blood pressure, poor performance and negative emotional tone because when we get in to stress your brain panic’s and end up getting suicidal though like “ I’ am going to died, if I stress out too much”. Or people die at the spot and don’t care how to suicide in which weapon or poison. At home my grandpa was home alone and went for smoke, and got his hand broken on the balcony. Then few days later he had epilepsy at night time. Then I started feel stress out that his life was in danger.

Symptoms include rapid heart rate, feeling weak, pale or dizzy, itchy or numbness in the hands and fingers, shaking or trembling, sense of terror or approaching doom or death, feeling perspiring or having chills, ringing in your ears, a need to go to the toilet, headache, tightness in the throat, respiratory disorder that is hyperventilation, urge to vomit, hot flashes, trouble swallowing food or water, cramps in the abdomen, chest pains, breathing difficulties and feeling a loss of control. Symptoms last for ten minutes mostly and you will feel tired after a panic attack. Symptoms can occur for other illness as well so see a doctor as soon as possible. Sometimes, the symptoms of a panic attack can be so strong they can make you feel like you are having a heart attack. However, it is significant to be aware that symptoms such as a racing heartbeat or shortness of breath will not cause you to have a heart attack.

Stress is a very common psychological reaction everyone has dealt with at some point in their lives. Stress is the emotional or mental strain on one’s mind and body resulting from a difficult or demanding situation, whether it may be life threatening or not. There are two types of stress, acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the reaction to the fight-or-flight response in a short amount of time. Whenever an individual perceives a potential threat to one's self, their mind and body prepares itself physically and mentally to deal with the threat, whether the individual decides to run away, or fight.

Stress has been proven to raise blood pressure, suppress the immune system and decrease mental clarity. More specifically, stress has been known to contribute to heart disease, asthma, obesity, diabetes, headaches, depression, anxiety, gastrointestinal disease, Alzheimer’s and ultimately, premature death. Stress is caused by an increase in the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is engaged when the body is in a state of “fight or flight”. When the body is under shock or a circumstance of distress or fear, the sympathetic nervous system is engaged.

Stress involves interaction of the person and environment. To quote a definition: “Stress is an adaptive response to an external situation that results in physical, psychological and / or behavioural deviations for organizational participants” (Luthans, 1998). Stress has generally been viewed as a set of neurological and physiological reactions that serves an adaptive function (Franken, 1994). Traditionally, stress research has been oriented toward studies involving the body's reaction to stress and the cognitive processes that influence the perception of stress. However, social perspectives of the stress response have noted that different people experiencing similar life conditions are not necessarily affected in the same manner (Pearlin, 1982).

Stress currently affects 100% of people living on the planet, some people know that they are stressed, others do not, and some people even believe they are stress free. Like it or not, believe it or not, everyone is dealing with stress. Although everyone is affected by stress, the quantity and effect of the stress differs. The misconception about stress is that it leads to health risks and an overall negative effect on one 's life when in reality stress is not only beneficial for one’s health, it is necessary in order to lead a healthy lifestyle. Stress is 85% psychological and 15% physical.

3. Review of literature 3.1 Stress and its types: Stress is an essential mediator of human behaviour. Immediate physiological response to any type of stressor facilitates survival of the species at its maximum. Despite of normal homeostatic regulatory mechanism, the stress responses can become maladaptive. Chronic stress, for example immobilization, exposure to noise, irradiations, psychological stress can leads to a host of adverse health consequences, including cardiovascular diseases, neurodegeneration, obesity, depression and early ageing (McEwen et al, 2004).

Every employee cannot cope with such rapid changes taking place in the jobs. This will lead to arising of stress among employees. Stress can affect one‘s health, work performance, social life and the relationship with family members. The stressors

• Work related stress: when employees become over stressed they tent to not be as productive as expected, it can also cause an employee to have a mental breakdown. Because of work overload employees cannot do everything expected from them which causes conflict in the workplace because production time goes lost and productivity goes down. Some stress may be caused by personal factors which may cause employees to be unhappy and take out ‘bad moods’ on co-workers. An example out of the case study is when Alex and Mandy feels that they have to work hard to prove that they are worthy of the position and title

Work stress reflects poor compatibility between the individual and the situations that one may face in the vicinity of the work. The stress occurs in situations where the employee perceives that his capacity to face work requirements represents a significant burden on him (Anderson R. 2003). The physical changes (rapid heartbeat, high blood pressure) and psychological changes (stress and anxiety) of an individual is the process of creating or willing to adapt compressor environmental variables (Bummer K. & B.H. Newberry,