Article Medically Reviewed By:
Pamela M. Peeke, MD, MPH
Pew Foundation Scholar in Nutrition and Metabolism Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine University of Maryland Baltimore, MD
Overview
What Is It?
Stressors are the external events, including pressures in people's lives, such as divorce, marriage, children, and work and money pressures. The experience of stress, however, is related to how you respond to these stressors.
Stress can be your friend or your foe. When stress fuels the spark of personal achievement, it can work to your benefit by making you more perceptive and productive, acting as a motivator and even making you more creative. But when stress flames out of control—as it often does for many of us today—it can take a terrible toll on your physical and emotional health, as well as your relationships.
While stress is not considered an illness, it can cause specific medical symptoms, often serious enough to send women to the emergency room or their health care professional's office. In fact, nearly one-third of adults report experiencing extreme levels of stress. According to the American Psychological Association's annual Stress in America poll, more people reported physical and emotional symptoms due to stress in 2008 than they did in 2007. Specifically, as a result of stress, 60 percent reported feelings of anger or irritability compared to 50 percent in 2007; 53 percent reported feeling fatigued compared to 51 percent in 2007; and 52 percent reported sleeplessness compared to 48 percent in 2007.
In today's fast-paced world, women are experiencing more stress at every stage of their lives than ever before. Juggling job pressures, family schedules, money issues, career and educational advancement and child and elder-care concerns are only a few of the common stressors confronting women.
Stressors are the external events, including pressures in people's lives, such as divorce, marriage, children, and work and money pressures. The experience of stress, however, is related to how you respond to these stressors. One person's stressor can be another person's motivator.
You can learn to intervene in terms of how you respond to stressors through relaxation, meditation, some forms of psychotherapy and exercise, among other methods. However, you can also work to reduce the stressors in your life, such as learning to say no to commitments, simplifying your life or leaving a bad job or relationship. Sometimes interventions that are originally designed to simply reduce your stress response and improve coping (for example, meditation and psychotherapy) can lead you to choose to reduce the stressors in your life because you begin to see more clearly what needs to change in your life.
Working mothers, regardless of whether they are married or single, face higher stress levels—both in the workplace and at home. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the US agency respon...
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