Annals of Clinical and Laboratory Research

Opinion

Written by Mohd Razali Salleh, stress is part and parcel of life, no one is spared from the shackles of stress in your life through the vagaries of an increasingly challenging. However, the resistance of a person deal with stress is different. Uncontrolled stress can trigger anxiety and other mental illnesses for those with exposure factors such as genetic background and personality disorders. Therefore, it is important to control stress at an early stage before it brings short and long-term complications. Based on this awareness, this book was written, in addition to the lack of clinical psychology reference books in Malaysia language. Easy way to treat patients who suffer from anxiety is to give a sedative that can cause many complications, including a tendency to rely on or addicted to drugs in the long term.

The general definition of stress is an individual action against an event or incident that needs to make adjustments in his or environment. From a different angle, the stress can be defined as a condition when there is increased adrenergic activity that causes physical symptoms, psychological and behavioral. Well-known names in relation to physiological stress such as Claude Bernard, Walter Cannon and Hans Selye. Bernard began to introduce the concept of the body's internal environment (milieu interieur). Before the concept of stress is introduced, Bernard has already explained how the organism can maintain internal equilibrium despite interference from outside. For example, the way the body acts to maintain the balance of the heartbeat, body temperature and respiratory rate when the weather changes. The work of Bernard joined by Walter Cannon, 50 years later. He developed the concept of milieu interior and renames it as a process of environmental stability (homeostasis).

Cannon proposed a theory that living things will maintain homeostasis of the body holding system deviated from its original function. When the body system deviates substantially from the original function, the organism would be in danger. To avoid this situation occur, internal physiological processes will act automatically to restore it to its original condition, with the body can compensate for the effect of pressure from the outside. Hans Selye of Canada continues the work of Cannon.

In an attempt to animals in the lab, he found that these animals not only serve to stimulation by a complex physiological process, but also produce the same response no matter what the cause. Selye name this phenomenon as not specifically in response to stimuli. Non-specific response to this stimulus is the basis for the theory of stress by Selye. He then defines stress as the response of the body that is not specific to any stimulus.

Selye then produce a model to explain the non-specific response and adjustments had to be made by the body. This theory is called the General Adaptation Syndrome which has three phases: alert, resistance and exhaustion. All three of these are successive phases each other. Performance is defined as a person's ability to perform tasks and adapt to its environment. Resurrection is also generally associated with conditions that include the level of sensitivity of intelligence and deadlock. In the beginning (the anabolic), there is an increase in performance to do a task in parallel with the increase in the resurrection. However, the increase in this resurrection will add performance to a level only. After reaching the optimum level, performance will decrease (the catabolic) continue to increase despite the rise. At this performance degradation, stress symptoms start to arise. Physiological implications of this curve describe some clinical phenomena related to stress. For example, stress at low levels is useful in that it will encourage a person to work harder, but the reverse occurred with increasing levels of stress when the performance decreases.

The two main factors that determine whether or not the response to stress is the cause of the severity of stress (stimulus) and the perception of that stimulus. Assessment to determine the perception that the stimulus is a threat or not occur at the diencephalon, which is the part of the brain that contains the thalamus and hypothalamus. In general, the more powerful a stimulus, the higher the likelihood of stress due to the growing perception of the threat. However, this relationship does not always exist because one's perception of threat stress and ability to cope with stress is different from each other. Therefore, we find that there are people who are more susceptible or prone to stress than others.