Category: Stress 101

21ST CENTURY. Monday morning. You are stuck in a motorway traffic jam on your way to work. There are cars in front of you, there are cars behind you. No movement at all! You will be late for work, that’s for sure. And you have an important meeting with a…

STRESS IN THE 21ST CENTURY. So you arrive late for work and your boss is certainly not happy with it. At the meeting with the client, you go out of your way to make up for the bad impression caused by your late arrival. Then around noon, you receive a…

Stressor, as the name suggests, is a stimulus or an event that causes psychological and/or physical stress. Let me give you some examples of what that means.   A psychological (and social) stressor could be for example time pressure when you work three shifts (work, household, children). Or parenting issues,…

Have you ever wondered why one situation stresses you out but other doesn’t? It is because each time you get exposed to a potentially stressful situation, a cognitive appraisal process subconsciously runs in your head. This process was described by American psychologist Richard Lazarus. Imagine the following situation at work:…

(EU)STRESS – MAKE IT YOUR BEST FRIEND! Everything has its good side and bad side. Unfortunately, we usually see only one of them. This rule applies to stress too. Think about stress in general for a moment. What thoughts come to your mind? Negative, right? So for a change, I…

Two situations out of real life. In each case, a boss asks his employee to work overtime again. In the first case scenario, the employee is a cheerful, always positive 28 years old Adam, without family commitments, for whom the work comes always first. “No pain. No gain” is his…

How many times during a meal with your family instead of giving your full attention to the conversation you checked your emails? How many times on vacation abroad did you take part in the important teleconference? How many times checking your emails was the last thing you did before going…

Over a few years’ time I lived in three different countries: Ireland, Switzerland, and Germany. After leaving Ireland, I had to organize my life from scratch firstly in Switzerland and then again in Germany. All that having a full-time job, traveling on business and learning a new language. Oh, I…

YOU MUST KNOW THEM! Of course, that you don’t have to 🙂 – but in case you decide to read further, here they are the three stages of stress according to Hans Selye, the “father” of stress research. PHASE 1 – ALARM The stressor is identified. It could be a specific situation…

THE PROJECT ”STRESS” Your body is like a big company whose employees work with the sweat of their brow on various projects. One of them is a ”Stress project”, managed by the team ”Adrenal glands & Co.”. For the project to be successful everyone on the team has a different…