1.Encounter Stress
This has to do with the relationships in your life. This covers your intimate relationships, your work relationships and even stranger or acquaintance relationships. This type of stress can be low or high level. When you experience this type of stress, it doesn’t mean that you’ve actually been in a situation with someone and it’s caused you to feel stress.
You can worry and fear about an encounter before the actual encounter even happens. An example of this would be an upcoming meeting with your boss. He’s requested to see you and you have no idea what it’s about. So you begin to stress and create scenarios in your mind about what it could be. You can ‘what if’ yourself into imagining that he’s going to fire you. From there, your mind can spring to how you’re going to pay your bills and how you’ll find another job. The type of life that you have can often determine whether you have a high stress level due to encounter stress. People who work in jobs where there’s a great deal of emotions (such as in a hospice care group) might have a higher rate of encounter stress than other people would normally have.
2.Time Stress
This can occur when you’re feeling overwhelmed with everything that you have to get done – so you fret that you don’t have enough time. You ‘what if’ that you’re not going to get everything done and your stress level rises. An example of this would be having to be somewhere for an important meeting that you absolutely can’t miss and things crop up to put you behind. Sometimes people will engage in time stress before there’s even an issue. This ‘what if’ worry can make them feel anxious and depressed because they worry how it will affect their future. The panic it causes can result in even more stressful situations to occur.
3.Situational Stress
This is what happens when you’re in a situation that causes immediate stress. An example of this can be a car accident, a child becoming ill or a job loss. In situational stress, it’s the situation that causes the worrying and the emotions that go along with it. This kind of stress can be short or long term.
4.Anticipatory Stress
This is stress that you get because you’re anticipating something that’s coming your way. This might be having to give a speech or wanting to ask for a raise or loan payment or rent is due. It can also be about something that’s not even on the horizon. It’s a fear that the other shoe is going to drop. This type of stress is the kind that has the most ‘what if’ worry involved with it because it’s focused on things that haven’t even happened – and may never happen! And when the things that you worried about do come to past, they often don’t look anywhere as frightening or terrible as what you thought they’d be. The levels of stress are chronic, acute and episodic acute stress.
5.Chronic Stress
With this level, you would feel this stress on a long-term basis. This might be something like being stuck in a job that you hate because it drains you emotionally. Or it could be something like being in a relationship with someone who isn’t healthy for you to be around. Chronic stress can often make you feel like you’re stuck – like life will never change or get better for you. You can feel a great deal of pressure. This can come from a financial setback such as losing a home to foreclosure. It can stem from a trauma. Chronic stress can cause people to view the world differently and learn to push down emotions in an effort to try not to think about what you’re dealing with.
6.Acute Stress
This level is what most people deal with - and it’s the best level of stress to have. This level of stress comes and goes fairly quickly. While there is pressure and fear sometimes associated with it, it doesn’t last. An episodic acute stress level means that there’s a constant hamster wheel of stress. It can feel like your life is on fast forward, like you’re part of the rat race and you can’t stop or everything would go haywire. People who end up with this level of stress experience it often because they haven’t learned to say no to demands on their time. They often focus on too many things at once. Their level of stress is easy to see in the way that they can never seem to relax and let things go.
Worrying about Stressful Situations Affects Your Health
Thinking about a problem or wondering what’s going to happen isn’t the same thing as worrying about it. When it crosses the line is when you begin to ‘what if.’ You might ‘what if’ about an event, a person or an unknown future.
Many people will ‘what if’ in their mind. Unfortunately, most of them create all sorts of ‘what ifs’ that have a negative aspect to the thoughts. From that negative ‘what if’ can spring a ton of stress that can turn into long-term stress if the habit isn’t broken.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking ‘what if’ when you’re trying to brainstorm and come up with a purpose or a plan to deal with stress. But if you do random “what ifs” where you let your mind wonder from one bad possibility to the next, this is pointless and can even be bad for your health.
This kind of ‘what iffing’ is a stagnant process that doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s like sitting in a rocking chair moving back and forth and expecting to get from point A to point B. This negative ‘what iffing’ doesn’t help anything and all you gain is fear and a sense of foreboding about the situation or your future. When you engage in unproductive, negative ‘what ifs,’ you can start to experience a host of various health problems.
You can develop headaches or stomachaches. You might start to encounter muscle problems. Worrying about stress is bad for your heart health. When you worry about stress, studies have shown that this habit is known to cause high blood pressure, tachycardia and shortness of breath.
Worrying about stress can even cause heart disease. The reason that it can do this is because when you worry about stressful situations, your body gets an influx of stress hormones. Having a regular dose of stress hormones puts additional pressure on your heart because of the high blood pressure that goes hand in hand with raised stress hormones.
Besides affecting your body’s health in a myriad of ways, worrying about stress affects your emotional health and your mental health, too. If you worry about stressful situations to the point that it becomes an ongoing habit, you can be at risk of having a mental breakdown.
This usually happens when thinking about and dealing with stress reaches the point where a person simply can’t deal with it any longer. When that happens, he or she can lose the ability to go about their day as they normally would.
It’s an abnormal response to stress that’s linked with worrying about stressful situations and feeling like there’s no relief for the stress in sight. When worrying about stressful situations reaches the point where someone is having trouble eating and begins to deal with insomnia, that’s the point where something must be done immediately to alleviate the worry.
The Four Types of Pre-Meditated Stress Analysis
People cope with stress in different ways. These coping mechanisms can be labeled four different ways:
1.Problem Analysis
With this type of coping mechanism, people think about the problem. This way of thinking usually means the person is using ‘what if’ in a positive way. They’re not simply turning the problem or situation over and over in their minds. They’re looking for how they can define exactly what the problem is. This is the first step that often motivates people to reaching for a solution to the problem. When someone engages in problem analysis, they can see the problem objectively without internalizing it to the point that they dwell on it long term.
This kind of coping mechanism is highly effective and doesn’t lead to emotional or physical problems that can happen with dwelling on a stressful situation. The type of people who use this method are the type that are able to separate