Everyday life provides us with a combination of happiness, pride, personal fulfillment, and strength, while sometimes simultaneously creating frustration, sorrow, feelings of inadequacy, and pain. Life is complicated and ever changing. Change, by itself, creates stress. Whether we embrace the change or not, we will feel the ramifications of stress. Given the constant changes and demands in our daily lives this becomes a major source of stress that we encounter.
Stress is the body's response to a threatening condition.
When confronted with stress, the mind tells the body that there is imminent danger and it must fight for its life or flee. In modern society, the stressful event may be a public speech or a deadline rather than a killer yak, but our body responds as if it were in danger of being destroyed. Stress causes our muscles to tighten, our breath comes more quickly, blood flows more quickly to spread the increased oxygen throughout the body, nausea may set in, and thinking becomes confused. Once the stress is alleviated, our body is in a weakened state as it recovers from the adrenaline surge. Unremitting stress can impair the immune system making it less able to resist the viruses that cause disease and can lead to a constant sense of exhaustion and loss of energy.