Anxiety and Stress affects everyone in their life whether it’s constant, a couple times a day, or even weekly. This article will provide different stress factors that occur, how to notice these signs, and how to be able to help cope and deal with it.
Before one can identify and be able to handle stress, they need to be able to understand what stress is and the root causes of stress and anxiety. According to “Relief Mental Health,” anxiety is your body’s alarm system that alerts someone for potential danger. When anxiety doesn’t go away, it gives an individual unnecessary stress when everything that’s going on around them is okay.
There are different factors that build up into what causes stress and anxiety. Reading the article “The Science of Anxiety” points out different factors of stress and anxiety that aren’t always thought about.
“Reliefmh” explains chemical imbalances can play a role in stress so an individual’s brain uses chemicals called neurotransmitters to help communicate between nerve cells. These chemicals in the brain play a big role in how someone feels. Serotonin is a chemical in your brain that helps regulate your moods, Norepinephrine is part of the fight or flight response that takes place in certain situations.
Dopamine helps people feel certain ways, and Gamma-aminobutyric acid helps calm nerves down in the nervous system. If there are any imbalances in these chemicals then an individual is more prone to anxiety or stress.
Brain changes can also be part as to why one feels stress or anxiety, because a specific part of the brain called amygdala helps manage fear and anxiety. The amygdala detects potential threats and it triggers a person’s anxiety. Through different studies it has shown that if it’s overactive then those people end up having anxiety disorders.
Genetics also play a factor in stress and anxiety as well and depending on blood relatives their genes and anxiety can be passed down. Often heard of the cause of stress is environmental factors whether it’s school, work, personal life, sports, and trying to balance everything together. Through constant long term stress it can disrupt the neurotransmitters in the humans’ brain and make an individual more susceptible to anxiety.
To figure out and understand what the main root to stress is, I interviewed different students at Timberlane High School and asked them “How often do you experience stress and anxiety?” “ What causes this stress and anxiety?” “How do you cope with stress and anxiety?” “And how bad is your stress?”
During these interviews what I found was that most stress was caused by the amount of school work students receive, and for those who have a job that their jobs are stressful as well. A student also claimed that a cause of stress for them is worrying about what others think or even view them while they’re out in public. Including a high schooler “with everything that builds up during my school day then the rest of my day is stressful with all the work that I was given.” There was a mix of students with some saying that they stress daily, to those students who claimed they probably stress like 4-5 days a week.
Students were able to give different examples of how they were able to cope with their stress and the most used ways were listening to music, sleeping, talking to friends, and doing things that they enjoy. From a scale to not too bad, to okay, to bad a majority of the students claimed that how bad their anxiety gets is okay and then a small amount said it gets bad.
I also thought about these questions, because anxiety affects everyone differently whether you know someone is struggling with it or not. For me I stress daily and I can relate to the student that claimed that being out in public plays a role in the stress that occurs.
Due to the fact about caring what others’ opinions are about you as the individual, and having that go through the mind while also learning and doing work it can get stressful. I find a way to cope with stress is staying active and going to the gym to help clear my mind for a bit of time. Depending on how bad the stress gets, I feel it depends on what classes I have during that day and what I have to get done.
The article “Mental Health at Cornell” gives different ways to help cope and deal with stress. Making sure that a person is keeping up with nutrition, and sleeping 8 hours a night is important, so that your body is able to fully function. Connecting with others is also a good way because spending time with the people you enjoy, you are able to distract your mind on different things. Staying active is also a way to help relieve stress and is a beneficial way to get the mind off of things.
Throughout researching and gathering information for this article I feel that the root cause for stress and anxiety comes to what runs through an individual’s mind throughout the day. From worrying about how much work and stuff someone has to get done, to worrying about others’ opinions about that persons’ self.
Being able to recognize and acknowledge where your stress comes from is important and learning ways for you as a person to cope and deal with your own stress. No one has been able to fully pin down a reason as to what causes so much stress to an individual, but there is accurate information as to what factors play into an individual’s stress.
