What Is Stress? Stress is a psychological and physical response by your body to anything that is perceived as a threat or a challenge. Stress can be caused by either a negative challenge (like a death in the family) or a positive challenge (such as a wedding). When you experience stress, your body acts like an alarm system. In today’s society, it is hard to fight off or run away from mounting stress. But you can do something about it. While you can’t completely avoid stress, SecondsCount can help you minimize
it by changing the way you deal with stress, including: - Maintaining a positive approach to life - Setting realistic expectations of yourself and other people - Identifying any unhealthy ways you might be coping and instead choosing healthier ways to relax and manage stress.
What you may not realize is that stress has a significant impact on your brain. 1 When your brain is under stress, it goes through a sequence of reactions, some beneficial and some poor, to mobilize and protect itself from potential threats. Stress can sometimes assist the mind sharpen and improve the ability to remember specifics about what is going on. Stress has a bad impact on both the body and the mind. Stress has been discovered to have a wide range of harmful consequences on the brain, ranging from contributing to mental illness to reducing the brain’s volume.