Student Stress Management
This section of Top Stress mangment helps you understand what stress is

It defines stress and then explains the fundamental mechanisms behind it. Next, it shows you the effects that stress has on your health and on your performance. Finally, it introduces you to the different approaches to stress management used on this site.
Fundamental
Much research has been conducted into stress over the last hundred years. Some of the theories are settled and accepted; others are still being researched and debated. This section helps you understand some of the key concepts and theories from current psychological research. These are the foundation on which this site and the tools and techniques within it have been designed.

We start by defining stress. We then look at the underlying mechanisms that cause it.
Stress and its impact on you
Next, we look at the nature of stress and consider the relationships between stress and health, and between stress and work performance.

We see how stress can have very negative effects on your short- and long-term health, performance and career success, as well as on your personal happiness. This emphasizes the importance of good stress management.
“Fight-or-Flight”
Some of the early work on stress (conducted by Walter Cannon in 1932) established the existence of the well-known fight-or-flight response. His work showed that when an animal experiences a shock or perceives a threat, it quickly releases hormones that help it to survive.

These hormones help us to run faster and fight harder. They increase heart rate and blood pressure, delivering more oxygen and blood sugar to power important muscles. They increase sweating in an effort to cool these muscles, and help them stay efficient. They divert blood away from the skin to the core of our bodies, reducing blood loss if we are damaged. And as well as this, these hormones focus our attention on the threat, to the exclusion of everything else. All of this significantly improves our ability to survive life-threatening events.
Power, but little control...
Unfortunately, this mobilization of the body for survival also has negative consequences. In this state, we are excitable, anxious, jumpy and irritable. This reduces our ability to work effectively with other people.

With trembling and a pounding heart, we can find it difficult to execute precise, controlled skills. And the intensity of our focus on survival interferes with our ability to make fine judgments based on drawing information from many sources. We find ourselves more accident-prone and less able to make good decisions.

It is easy to think that this fight-or-flight, or adrenaline, response is only triggered by obviously life-threatening danger. On the contrary, recent research shows that we experience the fight-or-flight response when simply encountering something unexpected.

The situation does not have to be dramatic: People experience this response when frustrated or interrupted, or when they experience a situation that is new or in some way challenging. This hormonal, fight-or-flight response is a normal part of everyday life and a part of everyday stress, although often with an intensity that is so low that we do not notice it.

here are very few situations in modern working life where this response is useful. Most situations benefit from a calm, rational, controlled and socially sensitive approach. Our Relaxation Techniques section explains a range of good techniques for keeping this fight-or-flight response under control.