What Is Chronic Stress?

A stressor is also called a stressor or stressor.It refers to any event or internal and external environment that can be perceived by an individual and produce a positive or negative stress response.

Chinese name: pressure source

Foreign name: stress
Applied discipline: psychology

Stressor concept

Stressors are situations, stimuli, activities, and events that cause individuals to respond to stress.

Perceived as a stimulus, or received as a message, will surely cause subjective evaluation, and at the same time produce a series of corresponding psychological and physiological changes. The adaptive capacity that a person can withstand will cause the imbalance of psychological and physiological balance, that is, the appearance of a stressful response. This internal and external stimulus that makes people nervous is a source of stress.

Classification of stressors

1. Divided according to the source: biological stressors, mental stressors and very stressors ^[1]

(1) Biological stressors:

This is a set of events that directly hinder and undermine the survival and ethnic continuity of individuals. Including physical illness, trauma or illness, hunger, sexual deprivation, sleep deprivation, noise, changes in temperature, etc.

(2) Psychological stressors:

This is a set of internal and external events that directly hinder and undermine the individual's normal mental needs. Including wrong cognitive structure, individual bad experience, moral conflict and bad personality and psychological characteristics caused by long life experience.

(3) Social environmental stressors:

This is a set of events that directly hinder and undermine the needs of individual societies. Divided into two aspects: purely social, such as major social changes, breakdown of important interpersonal relationships, long-term family conflicts, war, imprisonment, etc .; the second type is interpersonal adaptation caused by their own conditions, such as personal mental disorders, infectious diseases, etc. Problems, such as terrifying sex, poor social communication and other social and environmental stressors.

We divide pressure sources into three types, but this is the need for theoretical analysis. Actually, this is not the case. Because a pure single stressor is rare in real life, most stressors cover more than two factors, especially mental stressors and social stressors, and sometimes they are completely integrated. Due to the inseparable connection between the three stressors, we must consider the three stressors as an organic whole in the field of practice, especially when analyzing the root causes of the psychological problems of help seekers.

2. Divided into acute stressors and chronic stressors according to the degree of impact on life

(1) Acute stressors are also called negative life events, which are discontinuous, have clear starting and ending points, and can be observed and obvious life changes.

(2) Chronic stressors refer to daily distress, which can be divided into minor distress in life and distress caused by long-term social events.