In today’s tempestuous COVID-19 milieu, stress has become far too invasive, unrelenting and menacing — primarily because it emanates first and foremost from psychological factors, just as much from physical fear. It also elevates our immediate reaction in certain situations on which we have no power. The incongruity in the COVID-19 distress is something unprecedented — unlike any in the past, where a certain amount of stress was evidenced to be beneficial for the body. This was, and is, the credo that facilitated our ancestors and assists our own primal ability to deal with most physical and emotional stressors.
In our tizzy, uneasy coronavirus-centric world, the nature of stress is not related to facing a grizzly marauder, or enemy attack on our fort, or defences, as it happened during times long gone by. The COVID-19 storm has brought in a plethora of health- and life-threatening cogs — unlike anything in modern history. The resultant outcomes are not difficult to identify: blood clots, lung collapse, and heart attack, and, most importantly, a creepy vulnerability to the COVID-19 ‘terrorisation.’
From the time Hans Selye, a pioneer in stress research, defined stress as a “psycho-physiological (mind-body) event that takes place when our system is overwhelmed by any experience, physical, mental or emotional,” stress has only intensified — the difference being of degree, primarily because in today’s world the types of stress we face are not direct, or physical. Stress, in contemporary terms, is more often related to, or caused by, emotional and psychological factors. So, you may well ‘ballpark’ that the ‘fight-or-flight’ response of yore may not be appropriate to our times. Put simply, stress, any which way you look at it, is a completely internal phenomenon — a reaction by our mind and body to tense events. In other words, it reflects how we see and deduce them.
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