Known Causes of Stress
Stress can be defined as an emotional reaction to the changing environment. In other words, when we perceive a change in our environment, it may be a threat, fear, excitement, uncertainty, or cognitive dissonance, we experience stress. Since stress is a personalized reaction to environmental stimuli, so there can be virtually a wide number of causes of stress. However, in this article, we are discussing few known causes of stress.
General Causes
The general causes of stress can be categorized under four distinctive heads - perception of threat, perception of fear, perception of uncertainty and cognitive dissonance. An individual feels stressed out as a result of perceived threat, which can be of different forms like social, financial, personal, and so on. When the individual is experiencing that there is virtually no way to come out from the possible threats, intense level of stress is perceived.
On the other hand, perception of fear also produces stress. This type of perception actually leads an individual to construct imaginary solutions and these solutions are perceived as stress. Although we do not have much idea about our future life or activities, we live our life with a belief of our ability to anticipate near future. But sometimes we lack this ability due to some reasons, be it personal, environmental or social, we then become stressed out about uncertainty.
Cognitive dissonance is characterized by a cognitive discrepancy occurred as a result of our thought and our action. It causes stress as a result of our conflict that we perceive from the situation. For instance, when we know Mr. A is a good guy for years and suddenly we come to know that he is doing a secret business on drug supply and this is why police has come to arrest him, we may perceive stress, since here our concept and observation differs significantly.
Life Causes
The life-related causes of stress may cover a wide variety of incidences, such as death of spouse, divorce, health hazards, sexual molestation, argument, financial change, relocation, change in job or school, etc. Not necessarily all changes must be negative in nature to bring stress in life. Changes can be positive one as well, such as marriage, pregnancy, promotion, distinction, doing research, preparation for examination, etc. While the negative stressors are known as distress, the positive ones are called eustress.
Organizational Causes
The organizational or job-related causes of stress may include demanding nature of the job, employee management, relation with coworkers, job responsibilities, workplace changes, high staff turnover, technological change at workplace, discomfort at workplace, job dissatisfaction, conflict between personal values and job role, lack of feedback from superiors, financial dissatisfaction, etc.
