STRESS

Problem. What causes you to feel sick when an illness strikes?

Background. There is a great difference between feeling sick and being sick. Being sick means that some part of the body is being damaged by an infection, a wound, or a deficiency of some kind.

Feeling sick is different. When you feel sick you have a headache, a fever, or some other discomfort. You feel this way when you are getting any of a number of diseases.

Explanation. Dr. Hans Selye noticed that sick people generally complain of the same symptoms when they first contract a disease. Selye wondered what causes these symptoms and why they were similar for so many diseases.

After years of research, he discovered that these feelings of sickness have many causes. They are not limited to physical causes. Emotional factors seem to cause many of the same symptoms. Fear, excitement, anger, or great enthusiasm can cause the symptoms as easily as a cold virus. Selye called all these causes stress.

He performed many experiments on rats. In each, he subjected a group of rats to intense cold, or a virus, or a frustrating situation, and certain reactions developed. The most noticeable were stomach disorders, an enlarged adrenal cortex, and shrunken lymph structures.

Selye realized that these three reactions  could be caused by any stress. Continued stress, however, brought about a second reaction; the internal symptoms disappeared! In cases where there was no disease, but there was stress, the body apparently was able to adjust to the stress and continue to function efficiently. Selye concluded that the body can accustom itself to stress and, if the stress is not too severe, can continue to function.

Selye also found that rats cannot tolerate stress forever. If stress is too severe, they eventually die. Fortunately, people are seldom required to tolerate such extreme degrees of stress.

Most people often experience the first two reactions to stress. Your feeling of sickness when you are first catching cold is your reaction to stress.

You have often experienced the second phase of the stress reaction, too. Remember when you got your "second wind" during a tiring game or long period of activity? That was an adaptation to stress.

Today, doctors are finding out more and more about Dr. Selye’s concept of stress. The more they learn, the better they can treat patients who are experiencing one of the three degrees of stress.

Maintaining Mental Health - Maintaining self-confidence

Maintaining self-confidence. Perhaps the most important sign of your mental health is your self-confidence. Young people often become discour­aged and feel that they are failures. There are some good ways to help you avoid these periods of discouragement.

Being realistic. You need to set reasonable goals for yourself and then do your best to achieve them. For ex­ample, if one school subject seems more difficult than others, you may have to work diligently to keep up with the class in that subject. In spite of all that you can do, however, there may be times when you do not succeed in what you planned to do. This happens to everyone. But through your own ef­forts you can be successful most of the time.

Success can come only when you aim for what you can do, no more and no less. Your successes may not be great enough to put you at the top, but they will certainly give you a sense of satisfaction and help to give you a feeling of self-confidence.

Being realistic about what you are capable of doing does not mean, how­ever, that you should feel satisfied with yourself and your accomplish­ments all the time. Most people do not work up to the level of their abilities. As you achieve each of your goals, keep moving each succeeding one farther and farther ahead. It is only in this way that you can improve your per­formance and achieve higher goals.

Think for Yourself
In what areas has it been easy to achieve the goals you set for yourself? In what areas has it been difficult?

Making an effort. Setting your goals will not insure your success; nothing can do that. Setting your goals is the first step to self-confidence. Making an effort is the second. If you allow discouragement or fear of failure to keep you from trying, you will never feel confident of your abilities. When you can continue to make an effort in the face of failure, you will find you have won respect for yourself and have gained self-confidence.