The way an individual responds to stress can be very different based on previous experiences. Normally, a stressor factor, such as a project for school, turns on the stress circuit, and it is turned off again when the stressor factor disappears. This can change for different reasons such as repeated stressors, failure of an individual to adapt to the stressor factor or defects that prevent the circuit from turning off.

When we are exposed to stress, the brain interprets the event as a threatening situation. The hypothalamus secrets adrenocorticotrophic releasing hormone (ARH), which stimulates the pituitary gland to produce adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH). ACTH stimulates the adrenal gland, located on top of the kidneys, to produce adrenaline and cortisol, increasing blood pressure and heart rate. When the stressful situation is over, the hippocampus (in the brain) stops the production of these hormones so the body can return to its normal state. 

If the stress response system goes out of whack, then other body systems like blood pressure and blood sugar stay in fight or flight mode. In essence, chronic stress causes our bodily systems to deregulate. We call this a domino effect. If the first one falls, then the others will soon follow.

In fact, chronic stress has been linked to heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type II diabetes, and depression. But the effects of chronic stress are worst for people at risk for developing these and other problems. For instance, if one has a family history of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, or has unhealthy lifestyle habits, then chronic stress can flip the switch that turns on these health problems

This is stress resulting from repeated exposure to situations that lead to the release of stress hormones. This type of stress can cause wear and tear on your mind and body. Many scientists think that our stress response system was not designed to be constantly activated. This overuse may contribute to the breakdown of many bodily systems.

Acute stress This is stress resulting from specific events or situations that involve novelty, unpredictability, a threat to the ego, and leave us with a poor sense of control N.U.T.S. This ‘on the spot’ type of stress can be good for you because the stress hormones released help your mind and body to deal with the situation. i.e.: Almost getting into a car accident or giving a speech in front of people. You feel your heart beat in your throat, you become hyper aware of everything around you, and feel pumped. These are signs that your stress hormones are hard at work!

In today's competitive modern world one encounters stress in various aspects of life. As an adaptive response to stress, there is a change in the serum level of various hormones including CRH, cortisol, catecholamines and thyroid hormone. These changes may be required for the fight or flight response of the individual to stress. However, long-term exposure to stress may lead to many deleterious consequences leading to various endocrine disorders. Also, stress leads to change in the clinical course or status of many endocrine conditions.Go to:Footnotes

Mental stress leads to chronic activation of the neuroendocrine systems. Cortisol favors central fat deposition, a decrease in the adipostatic signal leptin and an increase in the orexogenic signal ghrelin, inducing increased appetite and food intake. This phenomenon contributes to the current epidemic of obesity. The “stress” genes which have been selected under pressure in ancient environments may have not adapted to the rapid environmental changes of today.

Severe stress may be a risk factor for diabetes. Children aged five to nine years with stress were significantly more likely to be diabetic.[28] However, recent-onset Type 1 diabetics, 15-34 years old reported no major stress factors within the year before diagnosis.[29] Thus stress in early life may be a risk factor for diabetes, but not in young adults.

Chronic stress, experiencing stressors over a prolonged period of time, can result in a long-term drain on the body. As the SNS continues to trigger physical reactions, it causes a wear-and-tear on the body. It's not so much what chronic stress does to the nervous system, but what continuous activation of the nervous system does to other bodily systems that become problematic.

Esophagus When you're stressed, you may eat much more or much less than you usually do. If you eat more or different foods, or increase your use of alcohol or tobacco, you can experience heartburn or acid reflux. Stress or exhaustion can also increase the severity of heartburn pain. Stomach When you're stressed, your brain becomes more alert to sensations in your stomach. Your stomach can react with "butterflies" or even nausea or pain. You may vomit if the stress is severe enough. And, if the stress becomes chronic, you may develop ulcers or severe stomach pain even without ulcers. Bowel Stress can affect digestion, and what nutrients your intestines absorb. It can also affect how fast food moves through your body. You may find that you have either diarrhea or constipation.

When the body is stressed, the hypothalamus signals the autonomic nervous system and the pituitary gland and the process is started to produce epinephrine and cortisol, sometimes called the "stress hormones." Adrenal Glands (near kidneys) Stress signals from the hypothalamus cause the adrenal cortex to produce cortisol and the adrenal medulla to produce epinephrine. This starts the process that gives your body the energy to run from danger. Liver When cortisol and epinephrine are released, the liver produces more glucose, a blood sugar that would give you the energy for "fight or flight" in an emergency. For most of you, if you don't use all of that extra energy, the body is able to reabsorb the blood sugar, even if you're stressed again and again. But for some people — especially people vulnerable to Type 2 diabetes — that extra blood sugar can mean diabetes. Who's vulnerable? The obese and races more inclined to diabetes, such as Native Americans.

body returns to its normal state. Chronic stress, or a constant stress experienced over a prolonged period of time, can contribute to long-term problems for heart and blood vessels. The consistent and ongoing increase in heart rate, and the elevated levels of stress hormones and of blood pressure, can take a toll on the body. This long-term ongoing stress can increase the risk for hypertension, heart attack or stroke.

Three broad traditions of assessing the role of stress in disease risk can be distinguished. The environmental tradition focuses of assessment of environmental events or experiences that are normatively (objectively) associated with substantial adaptive demands. The psychological tradition focuses on individuals' subjective evaluations of their abilities to cope with the demands posed by specific events or experiences and their affective response to that evaluation. Finally, the biological tradition focuses on activation of specific physiological systems that have been repeatedly shown to be modulated by both psychologically and physically demanding conditions. We will focus on the first two approaches here.

High school administrators also say to reduce your child’s activities if she’s feeling overwhelmed. But how can anyone “explore interests” while streamlining? My daughter self-edited her extracurriculars: Knowing how challenging high school would be, she gave up piano (after eight years), dance (after 10 years) and travel soccer in order to play varsity sports for her school. A friend advised me to have her give that up, too, if she needed more time to study. I objected, because soccer is her one remaining passion and I know how important it is for children to be physically fit.

But my daughter lives in a world where everyone has a tutor — to score higher on SATs or to bring up an A-minus for Ivy League aspirations. A world where B students hire tutors to inch up to B-plus and students who cannot afford tutors lag behind. What do kids learn from this? Certainly not confidence. They’re supposed to be moving toward independence, yet they know they can’t do their schoolwork on their own.

The pressure on teenage children is astonishing — and harmful to their physical and psychological health. Rather than being inspired, they are given an inordinate amount of work, much of which is developmentally inappropriate. I once joked with an attorney that neither he, who writes persuasive depositions, nor I, a writing professor, could get higher than a B on our daughters’ English papers. How did our educational system turn into such a pressure cooker?

As illustrated to the left, increased stress results in increased productivity – up to a point, after which things go rapidly downhill. However, that point or peak differs for each of us, so you need to be sensitive to the early warning symptoms and signs that suggest a stress overload is starting to push you over the hump.

Stress is not a useful term for scientists because it is such a highly subjective phenomenon that it defies definition. And if you can’t define stress, how can you possibly measure it?

enson and others also say that negative patterns of thought may become the cause of chronic stress. Often they can be traced back to "nagging anxieties, stress-related emotional baggage or circular, obsessive mental tapes," that are recorded in the mind in early childhood, Benson says.      Say you had a perfectionist parent who tended to set you unrealistic goals. Your reaction then--"I can't do it!"--may unconsciously recur when the boss assigns a big project. Chemicals released in the brain create an inappropriate "fight or flight" response, and you stress out.      The goal of stress experts is to break that cycle. In "The Breakout Principle", Benson combines science and self-help. He suggests "turning on a natural inner switch to sever those past mental patterns." With practice that signal or "trigger," which can be as simple as taking a brisk walk, actually turns on different, calming brain chemicals.

    About 60 percent of visits to health care professionals are "in the stress-related, mind-body realm," acerbating problems from sexual performance to insomnia, says Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and co-author of "The Break-Out Principle."      The first problem for researchers seems elementary: agreeing on a definition. "Stress is different for each one of us," Rosch says. Giving a speech can be terrifying for some, but a delight for those who love being the center of attention.

 Chances are, when you get home the stress dragon will be waiting on your doorstep. Leaving stress permanently behind, or just putting it down at the end of the day, is an unreachable goal for many Americans who worry about everything from escalating terrorism alerts to their children's SAT scores.      Chronic stress is not easily set aside. It is packed inside mental suitcases and travels with us daily. "Counting on a spa or a vacation is looking for an external cure for an internal problem," says Denver psychiatrist Paul Dobransky.

Using free services like Twitter or Facebook is a trade-off. We get to keep in touch with friends and read some great content; but we lose a lot of discretion and privacy as a result. We just need to keep it in perspective. Remember the earlier stat that 40% of people post things to improve their image? When asked the question differently, 77% of people (almost 2X more) believe that their friends DO post things to improve their image. You know your friends' lives aren't any more perfect than yours, so don't let it stress you out. Put down your device every once in a while and enjoy the life you have.

All of this influence appears to correlate closely with stress. People who say social media influences the products they buy "a lot" are 45 percent more likely to say their lives are "very stressful." Maybe we can't afford all the fancy new products our friends are buying. Maybe we're too busy to follow the trends in music or fashion. Whatever the reason, it's evident that the more we pay attention to our friends' activities, tastes, and possessions, the more stress we report in our lives

There's a secondary, if unconscious, effect of all this social media influence: We feel pressured to portray our ideal selves for everyone to see. When surveyed, 40 percent of social media users admitted they often post/share things to improve their image. Honestly, how often do you see someone check-in at Dollar General, boast about their job demotion, or post pictures of the frozen chicken nuggets they microwaved for their kids? Seldom, right? Instead, we tend to highlight the positive aspects of our lives and personalities, if only to compete with everyone else who is doing the same thing. This need to measure and curate our social media persona has a strong association with stress. People who say they post things on Facebook or Twitter to improve their image are over 4.5 times more likely than other people to "always" feel stressed.

At first glance, this finding might be interpreted as somewhat uncaring — perhaps a sign of “schadenfreude,” or the pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. In fact, this finding is more likely to be an extension of the cost of caring. It could be seen as “the joy of missing out.” When women see more-distant acquaintances struggling with stressful events, it might have the effect of inducing relief that this particular event has not happened to someone closer to them. It is a reminder that the lives of close friends/family could, after all, be much worse. Controlling for other factors, the joy of missing out was typically associated with a score that was about 6% lower on our scale of perceived stress.

It is clear from this analysis that the cost of caring is particularly felt by women. This is a result of both the larger number of events related to women’s stress, and the higher level of awareness that women tend to have of major events in the lives of people around them. Controlling for other factors, in the unlikely example that a women is aware of all of the events we covered in the survey, she would typically score 32% higher than the average woman on our measure of perceived stress. A man would score 27% higher than the average man.

A number of recent studies have pointed out that emotions may be contagious through social networks.27 28 Stress may be one such contagion. Indeed, awareness of other people’s problems is associated with a range of negative outcomes, such as depression.29 The “cost of caring” associated with awareness of other people’s stressful events may be a negative consequence of social media use because social media may make users more aware of the struggles of those in their network

When toxic stress response occurs continually, or is triggered by multiple sources, it can have a cumulative toll on an individual’s physical and mental health—for a lifetime. The more adverse experiences in childhood, the greater the likelihood of developmental delays and later health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, substance abuse, and depression. Research also indicates that supportive, responsive relationships with caring adults as early in life as possible can prevent or reverse the damaging effects of toxic stress response.

Toxic stress response can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress response systems can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years.

Positive stress response is a normal and essential part of healthy development, characterized by brief increases in heart rate and mild elevations in hormone levels. Some situations that might trigger a positive stress response are the first day with a new caregiver or receiving an injected immunization.

"Advanced-level classes are more work, more projects, and usually tons of projects all at once. Sometimes they are worth the stress. I think the stress and pressure of advanced classes prepare us well for college though, and I think the work is more college level. I'm hoping all the stressing now pays off later," said Scott, who has a schedule full of advanced courses.

Many teens say they are actually looking forward to getting out of high school to escape some of the specific stress that comes with being a teenager. "Peer pressure and social situations on top of school and work can make people my age very stressed because we don't always know how to handle it. Trying to work, find a job, make money and do well in classes and extracurriculars can be a lot to handle," said Scott.

While the teen years are typically considered fun and carefree, many young people are harboring enough responsibility to make life more stressful than fun. Between advanced classes, extracurricular activities, responsibilities at home and part-time jobs, many teenagers are burning their candles on both ends.

Stress and sleep: When adults do not get enough sleep, 21 percent reported feeling more stressed. On average, teens reported sleeping far less than the recommended amount — 7.4 hours on school nights and 8.1 hours on non-school nights, compared with the 8.5 to 9.25 hours recommended by the National Sleep Foundation. Nearly one in five teens (18 percent) said that when they do not get enough sleep, they are more stressed and 36 percent of teens reported feeling tired because of stress in the past month.

Nearly half of teens (42 percent) reported they were not doing enough or were not sure if they were doing enough to manage their stress, and more than one in 10 (13 percent) said they never set aside time to manage stress. Similarly, stress continued to be a problem for many adults, while high stress and ineffective coping mechanisms remain ingrained in American culture. Forty-two percent of adults reported that their stress level had increased and 36 percent said their stress level had stayed the same over the past five years. Adults' average reported stress level was 5.1 on a 10-point scale, far higher than the level of stress they believe is healthy (3.6). Even though the majority of adults said that stress management is important to them, few set aside the time they need to manage it. Some adults said they take no action to help manage their stress — one in 10 adults (10 percent) said they do not engage in any stress management activities. More than one-third (36 percent) of adults said stress affects their overall happiness a great deal or a lot and 43 percent of adults who exercise to relieve stress had skipped exercise due to stress in the past month.

Few teens said their stress was on the decline — only 16 percent reported that their stress decreased in the past year — while approximately twice as many said their stress increased in the past year (31 percent) or believed their stress level will increase in the coming year (34 percent).

A woman with an average size network of Facebook friends is aware of 13% more stressful events in the lives of her closest social ties, compared with an equivalent woman who does not use Facebook. And that average woman user is aware of 14% more stressful events in the lives of her more-distant acquaintances. A typical male Facebook user who comments regularly on others’ posts is aware of 8% more stressful events amongst his closest social ties. A man with an average size network of Facebook friends is aware of 6% more major events in the lives of his acquaintances, compared with an equivalent male who does not use Facebook.

Those users who feel more stress are those whose use of digital tech is tied to higher levels of awareness of stressful events in others’ lives. This finding about “the cost of caring” adds to the evidence that stress is contagious.4

Overall, frequent internet and social media users do not have higher levels of stress. In fact, for women, the opposite is true for at least some digital technologies. Holding other factors constant, women who use Twitter, email and cellphone picture sharing report lower levels of stress.

Compounding these twin forces of family and studies is the tyranny of social media - a new, inevitable presence in every child's life today. "Teenagers lead a very stressful life in terms of being constantly judged on social media on what they wear, where they are seen, how many friends they have... they feel the pressure of having to look good at all times that leads to issues of negative body image and triggers eating disorders. Teenagers are often up all night chatting on social media which alters their sleep patterns, resulting in arriving at school tired and distracted which, in turn, results in poor performance," said John

The obverse aspect to family life in every child's life is the academic one. School, scholastic performance and the intense competitive nature of modern education places immense pressure on the young child who is exhorted to always be one step ahead of their peers. "The extraordinary expectations parents have of their child's performance at school [is also is a pressure point]," says John.

Augmented social expectations, peer pressure, hectic schedules that try to balance school and extracurricular activities leading to high stress are some of the reasons that are causing children in the age group of 13-20 to suffer from a host of mental issues ranging from depression and anxiety disorders to aggression and disconnect with reality, among other issues

Social situations can also be a source of stress for teens. They can feel pressure to fit in, to be popular and to have a lot of friends—whether these are real friends or not. And as teens become more independent, they may find themselves in new and possibly risky situations where they need to make tough choices.

Afterschool activities offer real benefits to teens. But they also leave them with less time to spend on studying and homework. Kids who don’t have good organization and time-management skills can easily become overwhelmed and feel that they’re falling behind.

Even on a daily basis, teens with learning and attention issues can be anxious about keeping up. For some kids, just being prepared for class can be a challenge. They may struggle to stay on top of assignments, finish projects on time and remember to bring work and materials to school

Kids have to worry about grades like never before, especially if they want to go to college. They need to choose a path for after high school, whether it’s college, trade school or full-time work. And they’re doing it in a competitive environment, where everyone is aware of what others are doing.

Teens' habits around sleep, exercise and technology (the average teen consumes an average of 7.5 hours of media per day) may play a role in contributing to higher stress levels. More than one in three teens says that stress has kept him up at night in the past month. But most teens aren't sleeping enough to begin with: The average teen sleeps 7.4 hours on a school night (far less than the 9-10 hours recommended by the CDC), the APA survey found. The survey also found that one in five teens reports exercising less than once a week or not at all, despite the proven stress-relieving benefits of physical activity.

Even before the pressures of work and adulthood set in, for most young Americans, stress has already become a fact of daily life. And this sets the stage early for unhealthy behaviors and lifestyle choices that may increase the risk of developing stress-related health problems down the road.

American Psychological Association's Stress in America survey found that Millennials, aged 18-33, were the country's most-stressed generation. Now, the title belongs to an even younger demographic: American teenagers.

Almost a third of adults with partners (31 percent) report that money is a major source of conflict in their relationship.

In 2007, there was no difference in reported average stress levels between those who earned more and those who earned less than $50,000, with both groups reporting the same average levels of stress (6.2 on a 10-point scale). By 2014, a clear gap had emerged with those living in lower-income households reporting higher overall stress levels than those living in higher-income households (5.2 vs. 4.7 on the 10-point scale).

3,068 adults in August 2014, found that 72 percent of Americans reported feeling stressed about money at least some of the time during the past month. Twenty-two percent said that they experienced extreme stress about money during the past month (an 8, 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale, where 1 is “little or no stress” and 10 is “a great deal of stress”). For the majority of Americans (64 percent), money is a somewhat or very significant source of stress, but especially for parents and younger adults (77 percent of parents, 75 percent of millennials [18 to 35 years old] and 76 percent of Gen Xers [36 to 49 years old]).

WASHINGTON — While aspects of the U.S. economy have improved, money continues to be a top cause of stress for Americans, according to the new Stress in America™: Paying With Our Health survey released today by the American Psychological Association. According to the survey, parents, younger generations and those living in lower-income households report higher levels of stress than Americans overall, especially when it comes to stress about money.

it’s this philosophy problem where you have an ass that’s equidistant from two piles of food, and he starves to death in the middle.”

"Producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy." That is, he's committed to finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton inventory of unburned carbon

calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

should be below two degrees Celsius

our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you,

Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong.

when you challenge a person’s position on an issue core to his or her identity, facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily deflected.

Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population.

I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism

the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is

The glacier Sólheimajökull has shrunk by 1100 feet in the last decade.

thermohaline circulation

Describes signs that the permafrost-which has existed for 120,000 years-is melting. Writer observed Romanovsky collecting data from some of his 60 electronic monitoring stations

that if carbon dioxide emissions continued to increase, the climate changes would be severe. It’s now 25 years since that report was issued, and, in that period, carbon-dioxide emissions have increased from 5 billion a year to 7 billion, and the earth’s temperature has steadily risen.

Churchill quote about democracy being the worst system of government, except for all the others. I mean, we all know geoengineering’s bad, now tell me what’s better

I drove back to Stanford, mindful that the carbon dioxide emanating from my tailpipe would persist in the atmosphere for hundreds of years

There is no solving the problem. There is no solving the problem. All it is is slowing the symptoms.”

If “turning down the sun” sounds like a patently bad idea for plant life, Caldeira has run the numbers on that too

In its wake, the global average temperature, which had been climbing steeply, suddenly fell by roughly half a degree Celsius—a drop accurately predicted by climate models. The cooling was only temporary, however. Within a couple of years, the mercury was climbing once again. To date, the fourteen warmest years on record have all occurred since 1990.

That “second option”—most often referred to as stratospheric sulfate injection—is hardly the only climate engineering proposal on the drawing board. Other schemes range from the merely goofy-sounding to the wildly implausible

global warming is an energy problem, and solving it will require nothing less than a complete and radical transformation of the world’s energy infrastructure, something most energy experts believe will take decades, if it happens at all.

But while seemingly everyone agrees that society should be hitting the brakes on fossil fuel consumption, we appear to be stepping on the gas instead.

The eruption killed at least ten thousand people instantly, entombing a culture and wiping out a language in the process.

“manmade dust and aerosols”—the very stuff of acid rain and nuclear winter