Stress affects everybody in different ways.

Essay by somokano July 2006

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You've got a major report due at noon, and it's not finished yet. Your daughter is close to flunking algebra. This morning, you sat in a horrible mess of traffic on the highway. Feeling stressed?

When you are stressed, your body is aroused and energized, and temporarily you go through changes. This is a natural process called the "fight-or-flight" response, which means do your body stay and fight the danger or do run away from it?

Stress can help you or hurt you. Your stress response can help you get through the pressure at work or help you adjust to a major change, such as, the arrival of a new child. However, chronic stress affects your quality of life, and your physical and mental health. Chronic stress can lower your immune system and is now believed that 80-90% of all disease is stress-related, such as depression.

The causes of stress can be either physical, psychological or both.

Physical illnesses due to prolonged stress are, such as irritable bowel syndrome, heart attacks, chronic headaches, high or low blood pressure, digestive system problems, sleeping problems. While psychological illness results from life situation, such as marriage, completing education, becoming a parent, losing a job, retirement.

A recent research indicates that some vulnerability to stress is genetic. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin and King's College London discovered that people who inherited a short, or stress-sensitive, version of the serotonin transporter gene were almost three times as likely to experience depression following a stressful event as people with the long version of the gene. Further research is likely to identify other genes that affect susceptibility to stress.

Although, stress is a natural process occurring to our body, it can lead to great deal of problems. Sometimes people under much stress eat poorly, drink too...