•     LIFESTYLE: is a personal and conscious decision to perform a behavior that may increase or decrease the risk of injury or disease.

•     Lifestyle is a way of living. It is how we live our everyday life. All humans try their best to get a good lifestyle.

•     Lifestyle conveys our opinions and attitudes. Alfred Alder gave the term lifestyle. He was an Austrian psychologist. He wrote a book named “The Case of Miss R in 1929”.

•     In the book, Alfred mentioned how a person’s childhood affects their lifestyle later.

•     Lifestyle is a mixture of real and abstract factors. The real factors include demographics. For example, the lifestyle in an Urban metro city is different from a village.

•     The abstract factors include preferences, views, and personal worth.

•     Types of lifestyles:

•     Lifestyle can be classified into many categories. We can diverge ourselves according to our lifestyle. It is possible to have more than one lifestyle.

•     Lifestyle can be based on your culture, work, and preferences. Some types of lifestyle are mentioned below:

1-    Active Lifestyle:

If you are outgoing or extroverted, this is your lifestyle. An active lifestyle includes exercising, socializing, and doing the work you love. It makes you feel good.

2-    Healthy lifestyle:

People may confuse themselves between Healthy Lifestyles and Active Lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle includes eating nutritious food. To keep your body active, you eat a nutritious diet. This diet keeps you energetic. A healthy lifestyle is the first step towards an active lifestyle.

3-    Solo Lifestyle:

People who like to be alone tend to have this lifestyle. They are independent in many ways. These people like to earn, travel, eat, etc., alone. This makes them more responsible. In this kind of lifestyle, as no one is judging you, you can achieve whatever you want. It’s about disciplining yourself to work. You are not in anyone’s control. Solo lifestyle is considered to be a free lifestyle.

4-    Rural lifestyle:

Rural lifestyle is followed in villages. The daily routine of these people includes doing farm-related work. They live close to nature. It is a peaceful way of living life. Some people are happier to live this kind of lifestyle, with no glamour and no social status.

5-    Urban lifestyle:

Urban lifestyle is more concentrated in cities. This is a fast-paced lifestyle. People who like to explore several things love this type of lifestyle. City life is often tough but exciting. Urban lifestyle brings more material goals to you. People thrive to achieve more in this lifestyle. If you want a fast-paced, exciting life, then this is for you.

6-    Unhealthy lifestyle:

•     Some people do not pay attention to their lifestyles. Lots of people do not pay attention to their lifestyles. Lots of people nowadays have an unhealthy lifestyle, because of which they encounter illness, disability and sometimes even death.

•     Here are six common, unhealthy lifestyle choices people often make when stressed that could impact their overall health and well- being:

   Not exercising enough, eating too much junk food, not getting enough                 sleep, smoking, drinking alcohol.

•     There are several problems such as metabolic diseases, being overweight, joint and skeletal problems, cardio-vascular diseases, hypertension, violence, that is attributable to an unhealthy lifestyle.

Faced with any challenge, we put in additional efforts and mobilize all our resources and the support system to meet the challenge.


All the challenges, problems, and difficult circumstances put us to stress. Thus, if handled properly, stress increases the probability of one’s survival.

Stress is a physical, mental or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension. Stress is a form of response towards an event or stimuli.

It may disturb the psychological stability of a person and diminish his/her ability.

•     Stress is like electricity. It gives energy, increases human arousal and affects performance. However, if the electric current is too high, it can fuse bulbs, damage appliances etc.

•     High stress too can produce unpleasant effects and cause our performances to deteriorate.

•     Conversely, too little stress may cause one to feel somewhat listless and low on motivation which may lead us to perform slowly and less efficiently.

•     It is important to remember that not all stress is inherently bad or destructive.

“Eustress” is the term used to describe the level of stress that is good for you and is one of a person’s best assets for achieving peak performance and managing minor crisis.

•     Eustress, however, has the potential of turning into ‘distress’. It is this latter manifestation of stress that causes our body’s wear and tear.

•     Thus, stress can be described as the pattern of responses an organism makes a stimulus event that disturbs the equilibrium and exceeds a person’s ability to cope.

EFFECTS OF STRESS ON HEALTH

•     What are the effects of stress? Many of the effects are physiological in nature, however, other changes also occur inside stressed individuals.

•     There are four major effects of stress associated with the stressed state, viz.

•     Emotional, physiological, cognitive, and behavioral.

Emotional Effects: Those who suffer from stress are far more likely to experience mood swings and show erratic behavior that may alienate them from family and friends.

•     In some cases, this can be start to a vicious circle of decreasing confidence, leading to more serious emotional problems.

•     Some examples are feelings of anxiety and depression, increased physical tension, increased psychological tension and mood swings.



Physiological Effects: When the human body is placed under physical

or psychological stress, it increases the production of certain hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol.

•     These hormones produce marked changes in heart rate, blood pressure levels, metabolism and physical activity.

•     Although this physical reaction will help us to function more effectively when we are under pressure for short period of time, it can be extremely damaging to the body in the long-term effects.

•     Examples of physiological effects are release of epinephrine and norepinephrine, slowing down of the digestive system, expansion of air passage in the lungs, increased heart rate, and constriction of blood vessels.

•     Cognitive Effects: If pressures due to stress continue, one may suffer from mental overload. This suffering from high level of stress can rapidly cause individuals to lose their ability to make sound decisions.

•     Faculty decisions made at home, in career or at workplace may lead to arguments, failure, financial loss or even loss of job.

•     Cognitive effects of stress are poor concentration and reduced short term memory capacity.

Behavioral Effects: Stress affects our behavior in the form of eating less nutritional food, increasing intake of stimulants such as caffeine, excessive consumption of cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs such as tranquillizers etc.

•     Tranquillizers can be addictive and have side effects such as loss of concentration, poor coordination, and dizziness.

•     Some of the typical sleep patterns, increased absenteeism, and reduced work performance.

STRESS AND HEALTH

•     You must have often observed that many of your friends (may be including yourself as well!) fall sick during the examination time.

•     The suffer from stomach upsets, body aches, nausea, diarrhoea and fever etc. you must have also noticed that people who are unhappy in their personal lives fall sick more often than those who are happy and enjoy life.

Chronic daily stress can divert an individual’s attention from caring for herself or himself.

•     When stress is prolonged, it affects physical health and impairs psychological functioning.

•     People experience exhaustion and attitudinal problems when the stress due to demands from the environment and constraints are too high and little support is available from family and friends.

•     The physical exhaustion is seen in the signs of chronic fatigue, weakness and low energy.

The mental exhaustion appears in the form of irritability, anxiety, feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

•     This state of physical, emotional and psychological exhaustion is known as burnout.

•     There is also convincing evidence to show that stress can produce changes in the immune system and increase the chances of someone becoming ill.

Stress has been implicated in the development of cardiovascular disorders, high blood pressure, as well as psychosomatic disorders, asthma, allergies and headaches.

•     Researchers estimate that stress plays an important role in fifty to seventy per cent of all physical illnesses.

•     Studies also reveal that sixty per cent of medical visits are primarily for stress-related symptoms.

COPING WITH STRESS

•     In recent years the conviction has grown that it is how we cope with stress and not the stress one experiences that influences our psychological wellbeing. Social functioning and health.

•     Coping is a dynamic situation-specific reaction to stress. It is a set of concrete responses to stressful situations or events that are intended to resolve the problem and reduce stress.

•     The way we cope with stress often depends on rigid deep-seated beliefs, based on experience, e.g. when caught in a traffic jam we feel angry, because we believe that the traffic ‘should’ move faster.

•     To manage stress we often need to reassess the way we think and learn coping strategies.

•     People who cope poorly with stress have an impaired immune response and diminished activity of natural killer cells.

•     Individuals show consistent individual differences in the coping strategies they use to handle stressful situations.

•     These can include both overt and covert activities. The three coping strategies given by Endler and Parker are:

Task-oriented Strategy: this involves obtaining information about the stressful situation and about alternative courses of action and their probable outcome; it also involves deciding priorities and acting so as to deal directly with the stressful situation.

•     For example, schedule my time better, or think about how I have solved similar problems.

•     Emotion- oriented strategy: This can be involve efforts to maintain hope and to control one’s emotions: it can also involve venting feelings of anger and frustration, or deciding that nothing can be done to change things.

  For example, tell myself that it is not really happening to me, or worry            about what I am going to do.

•     Avoidance-oriented strategy: This involves denying or minimizing the seriousness of the situation; it also involves conscious suppression of stressful thoughts.

•     Examples of this are watching TV, phone up a friend, or try to be with other people.

Lazarus and Folkman has conceptualized coping as a dynamic process rather than an individual trait.

•     Coping refers to constantly changing cognitive and behavioural efforts to master, reduce or tolerate the internal or external demands that are created by the stressful transaction.

•     Coping serves to allow the individual to manage or alter a problem and regulate the emotional response to that problem.

•     According to them coping responses can be divided into two types of responses, problem-focused and emotion focused.

Problem- focused strategies attack the problem itself, with behaviors designed to gain information, to alter event, and to alter belief and commitments.

•     They increase the person’s awareness, level of knowledge, and range of behavioral and cognitive coping options.

•     They can act to reduce the threat value of the event.

For example “I made a plan of action and followed it.”

Emotion-focused strategies call for psychological changes designed primarily to limit the degree of emotional disruption caused by an event, with minimal effort to alter the event itself.

•     For example “I did some things to let it out of my system’’. While both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping are necessary when facing stressful situations, research suggests that people generally tend to use the former more often than the latter.