Nothing but stress

Hello friends! 

It has been quite a while since I met you via this blog. So I thought that I better write lest you all forget me. 

The other day I went to a doctor for some ailment. She diagnosed me, did all the permutations and combinations with the answers I gave to the questions she asked and decreed that I have nothing but stress.

If you see, of late, anything to everything is being blamed on  stress. Then you have stress management therapies marketed to everyone including a preschooler. "Everybody undergoes a lot of stress" they say. 

This brings us to the question what is this stress? As per dictionaries it is our body's response to  situations that we may deem as threat. So what is that threat? Each person sees the same situation differently so what is a threat to you may not be for me.

See the irony here, no two people react to the same situation similarly but the cause for everything is clubbed together in one head stress.

The stress management therapies imply that stress  if managed would help us not only deal with psycho somatic issues like tension headaches but also improvise ourselves. This also means that not all stress is bad. 

Psychological Theorists came up with the terms Eustress, Distress and optimal stress. 

If we are to represent this graphically then we can take performance or productivity on Y axis and the level of stress on X axis. The resultant graph would be a inverted U. At zero stress there is zero productivity. Then gradually as stress increases the pressure to performance increases thereby increasing productivity. This stage of stress is called Eustress. At optimal levels of stress there is maximum productivity. Thereafter with increase in stress the productivity falls causing distress. 

Coming back to where I left when the doctor says that it was nothing but stress. You know what I did? I let out what she said out of the other ear and continued with what I always do ... Live my life.