How to cope with stressful situations

How to Handle Stressful Situations

Elizabeth Scott, PhD is an author, workshop leader, educator, and award-winning blogger on stress management, positive psychology, relationships, and emotional wellbeing.

Carly Snyder, MD is a reproductive and perinatal psychiatrist who combines traditional psychiatry with integrative medicine-based treatments.

You can’t always avoid stress, which is why it is important to know how to handle stressful situations. Getting better at managing stress is a great way to become more resilient and able to confront future challenges.

Often when people face a new and stressful situation—a job that’s a bit too challenging, a thorny relationship hurdle that will take a while to sort through, a change in lifestyle that feels like a step down from what they had—they feel overwhelmed at the thought that they may have to deal with this stress for an extended time.

People who worry about long-term stress have reason to be concerned: chronic stress, the type of stress that is continual and unchanging, can take a heavy toll. It can negatively impact both physical and mental health.

The good news is that you can mitigate the stress of virtually any situation, even if it is there to stay for a while. If you are facing a challenging life situation, or wondering if it gets easier and how to speed the process, try stress relief strategies that can help.

These techniques can help significantly if you face a life crisis or overwhelming stressor. But ff your stress feels unmanageable, seek help from a mental health professional.

Identify the Source of Your Stress

The first step toward handling stressful situations is to figure out what it is that is stressing you out. Understanding which aspects of the situation make things difficult for you can help you develop strategies to manage these feelings.

Identifying the cause isn’t as always as easy as it sounds. While you might recognize that starting a new job or moving to a new area is stressful, being able to point to the specific aspects of the situation that are difficult for you is important.

For example, knowing you are stressed about meeting new people at your new job can help you cope with the social aspects of work.

Writing in a journal can often effectively decrease stress and anxiety. It can also be a useful tool for learning more about your stress sources and how you typically cope with stressful situations.

How to Keep a Stress Journal

Consider situations where you might feel anxious, stressed, or overwhelmed, and ask yourself:

Have the Right Attitude

You can’t always control what you are facing, but you do have a choice in how you face it. You can choose the attitude you take, which can help determine whether you view each situation as a threat or a challenge.

Research shows that viewing something as a challenge helps you mobilize resources and bring your «A game» to the situation more easily. Viewing the same situation as a threat can lead to greater stress and worse performance.

There are a number of problems associated with avoiding the source of your stress. This approach is known as avoidant coping and while it provides temporary relief, it can actually make stress and anxiety worse in the long run.

Understand the Role of Attitude

Your attitude can help to determine how stressful a situation feels for you, and how you approach your options. In fact, attitude can affect which options you see and do not see, which can also affect your stress levels and the outcome of your actions.

Examine Your Thought Patterns

Your thought patterns may feel automatic, but you can choose where your focus lies. Research has found, for example, that thought patterns can contribute to increases in the stress hormone cortisol.

To begin to make that choice, it helps to become aware of your habitual thinking patterns. This exercise can help you to see these patterns more clearly and can help you to relieve stress in the process.

Practice Positive Self-Talk

Positive self-talk means using more optimistic language in your head, and focusing more on possibilities. It involves more than merely trying to look on the bright side, although that is part of it.

Learning how to shift your focus can help alter what is possible for you. For example, instead of focusing on the negative aspects of a situation that are out of your control, you might instead focus your attention on areas where you can make a positive change.

Change What You Can

Sometimes there are certain aspects of a situation you can change, even if you cannot change the overall situation. Focusing on what you can control can help you feel more empowered and less helpless when you are handling a stressful situation.

For example, you may, for financial reasons, be unable to quit a job you don’t enjoy. However, you can connect with co-workers more, alter your attitude while you’re at work, and use your break time for stress management activities. All of these can alter how you feel when you are at this job.

Try Solution-Focused Coping

Solution-focused coping means taking action to change your life where you are able. Examples of solution-focused ways to handle stress include:

These changes can be large in scale or small but targeted. Change can bring stress, so it’s important to choose the changes that matter most.

Find and Eliminate Tolerations

Tolerations are those nagging stressors in your lifestyle that you put up with almost without realizing it, but which bring you constant low-grade stress. The thing about tolerations is that they add up to bigger stress.

Cutting out tolerations can relieve stress so you can tolerate more things you can’t change.

Create a New Life Plan

Knowing where you want to go and having a plan for the future, can help to minimize stress in the present. Planning changes according to your values and priorities can be helpful and inspiring, even if you can’t bring those plans to fruition for a little while longer.

One study found that people who balance living in the moment and making plans are the most resilient in the face of daily stress and stressful situations.

Build Resilience

If you can’t do any more to change your situation, you can still reduce the stress you feel as you manage your daily life. Certain activities can promote resilience, help you feel less stressed overall, and help you be less reactive to the stressors you face when they rear their ugly heads.

Practicing resilience-building activities can help you develop new skills for managing stress. The more they become an automatic habit, the less your stressors will bother you.

Self Care

Everything feels more stressful when you are tired, hungry, and run down. It also means that you have fewer coping resources at your disposal. This means that you are more likely to react to stress rather than respond to it. Or you might let things snowball until things become even more overwhelming.

Focus on taking care of your body, and you will have a greater ability to handle frustration and stress in your life overall. Do things that make yourself feel good and cared for, whether that’s getting a massage, reading a book, or enjoying a relaxing spa day at home.

Exercise

Exercise is one of those wonderful stress relievers that can build resilience by helping you to blow off steam. Better still, regular exercise can help you to become less reactive toward stress.

Because of that and the obvious health benefits of exercise, this is a powerhouse of a stress reliever that should be worked into your schedule when at all possible.

Meditation

Meditation can help you to remain centered in the face of stress and can help you to regain a sense of peace when you are feeling off-balance. Many meditation techniques work well, so try a few and stick with a favorite technique that feels right.

Over time, you should find yourself reacting to stress with less intensity and more able to remain calm and peaceful.

Positive Attitude

Maintaining a positive attitude is one thing you can do to make everything in your life feel easier. A positive attitude also helps you to get along better with others (which can lead to greater social support and less conflict) and can help you to remain feeling good, even when things around you are not so great.

A Word From Verywell

It would be great if you could simply avoid or eliminate the stressors in your life. Unfortunately, that’s only possible to an extent. There will be times when you are all faced with unpredictable or unavoidable stressors when you need to rely on resilience. You may not be able to change everything in your life, but these tips can help you handle stressful situations.

Yaribeygi H, Panahi Y, Sahraei H, Johnston TP, Sahebkar A. The impact of stress on body function: A review. EXCLI J. 2017;16:1057-1072. doi:10.17179/excli2017-480

Lukić J, Lazarević S. A holistic approach to workplace stress management. Škola Biznisa. 2019;(1):130-141. doi:10.5937/skolbiz1-21872

Schultchen D, Reichenberger J, Mittl T, et al. Bidirectional relationship of stress and affect with physical activity and healthy eating. Br J Health Psychol. 2019;24(2):315-333. doi:10.1111/bjhp.12355

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Meditation: In Depth.

Coping With Stressful Situations

Momentary vs. Lasting Stress

Sometimes a stressful situation just lasts a moment — like getting through a school play audition or making the foul shot that could win the game.

But life also can bring situations that might keep us stressed for a few days, weeks, or months. Even if we’re not always thinking about this stress, it can be like a background soundtrack playing in our lives.

If you’re like most people, you’ve faced these kinds of lasting stressful situations. Feeling unprepared or unhappy about the situation increases the stress. Stressful situations can wear us down over time. Finding ways to deal with them can help us grow strong.

Build Good Coping Skills

How well — or how poorly — we get through a stressful situation depends a lot on us. How we deal with stressful situations makes all the difference.

Here are some steps you can take to cope with a stressful situation.

1. Understand the Situation

2. Commit to a Positive Attitude

A positive attitude helps stop you from being dragged down by unhappy feelings. A positive attitude also boosts the problem solving that a stressful situation requires.

A positive attitude helps us see the possibilities within a situation, while negative thinking narrows our view.

Stressful situations can test our strength, for sure. Whatever you’re facing, it can help to think through the situation, accept the emotions you feel, and keep a positive attitude. Focus your efforts on what you can influence, get support, and care for yourself. All these things can help you cope with your situation, lessen the stress, and help you come through feeling strong and confident.

7 Tips On How To Handle Stressful Situations

There are a lot of stressful situations that people face in life. Some of these situations may be small, and other ones may be major life-changing situations. Either way, they can be challenging to navigate through. Learning effective stress management tips can make a big difference in helping you get through challenging and stressful times.

The Importance Of Learning How To Handle Stress

Living with stress doesn’t feel good. Stress can weigh heavily on your mental health and negatively impact your physical health as well. While it might present itself in slightly different ways, some of the signs of stress in your life could include:

If you’re experiencing these common signs of stress, it can be a good indication that it would be helpful to learn stress management strategies to use in your life.

What Are Stressful Situations?

Stressful situations will look different for each person. What one person may be able to handle with little or no stress, someone else may experience a lot of stress over. And, you may experience stress over big life-changing events in your life or over small everyday problems.

Large situations that could cause stress in your life could include things like:

Many people understand that large situations like that often come with stress. However, these same people may struggle to identify the source of stress in their own life. If you feel like you shouldn’t have stress because you’re not living through a large situation like one listed above, it’s important to give yourself a break.

Many things can cause stress in life. And, even small stresses can turn into chronic stress if not addressed. Some of the “smaller” causes of stress in life include things like:

Many things can arise daily that can lead to stress. This is why it can be helpful to learn tips on how to handle stressful situations even if you don’t feel like you need it at the moment. You never know when life is going to change, and you’re going to face something unexpected.

Tips On How To Handle Stressful Situations

There are many different tips available on how to handle stressful situations. Below are a few that you may find helpful to use in your life. However, remember that each situation and each person is different. You need to find the best coping strategies that work for you specifically. Here are a few places to get started.

One of the first things that you may find helpful when facing a stressful situation is to learn everything you can about the situation. It can be easy to allow your perspective to cause you to see situations differently than what they actually are. This is why it can be helpful to spend time really looking at the situation objectively to identify what’s happening.

If you are too close to the situation, it may be hard for you to gain a proper perspective on this. Or, if you’ve been experiencing chronic stress, you may not realize where it’s coming from. You may find it helpful to talk to a few other people that you trust in your life to gain some outside perspective in this area. They may be able to help you see things that you might be missing.

It will be easier to work through a stressful situation if you understand it well and have the facts that you need to make wise decisions. It can be easier to deal with stress when you understand what’s causing it.

It’s easy to go along in your busy day without really realizing and thinking about what you’re feeling. However, it can be an important first step in addressing stressful situations to learn how to identify and name your feelings.

It’s been found that simply identifying and giving a name to the emotions that you’re struggling with can help them to lose some of their power in your life. One psychologist has labeled this “name it to tame it.” Once you identify and know what emotions you’re dealing with in a stressful situation, it can help you start to regain control and see what needs to happen next.

If you’re overwhelmed with stress, it’s easy to start to see things in a negative light. It may be natural to feel anger, sadness, and other negative emotions during a stressful situation.

However, choosing to have a positive attitude can help you as you work through your stress. Focusing on the negative can cause you to keep highlighting the negative aspect of the situation. When your mind focuses on this, it can become difficult to look for solutions and see how you can handle your stress better. When you choose to have a positive attitude, it can help you keep your mind open to other options and solutions that may be available.

This doesn’t mean that you need to fake being happy when you’re going through a bad time in your life. It simply means that you allow your mind to stay open to positive thoughts and experiences as well. You choose not to let your mind stay focused on negative thoughts.

During stressful situations, it can be helpful to think about the things that you’re thankful for in your life. Stress can have a way of making everything seem contrary. However, most people will be able to identify at least a few things that they’re thankful for, even in the midst of a stressful situation.

You may find it helpful to keep a running list of things that you’re thankful for each day. Then, when you have moments when you are really struggling to remain positive, you can look back at the list and see all of the positive things that you have in your life.

It can be tranquil when you are under stress to focus on all of the problems that are happening around you. But when you allow your mind to focus on the issue, it becomes harder to see any solutions.

This is why it’s helpful to be purposeful in looking for what you can do to improve your stressful situation. There may be many parts of it that are out of your control, but if you are proactively looking, you may be able to find a few things that you can do to make small improvements to the situation.

When you are experiencing chronic stress, it may be difficult to continue taking care of yourself the way that you usually do. When you’re short on time, and there are a lot of problems running through your mind, you may not feel like eating, exercising, or spending time with friends. It may feel difficult to find enjoyment in any activities because your mind is constantly focused on your stressful situation.

However, it’s important to continue taking care of yourself even when you’re going through a difficult time. Not paying attention to your self-care can end up compounding your stress and making your situation even worse. For example, if you don’t get the right amount of sleep at night, you may notice it impacting your ability to concentrate during the day. Or, if you are frequently skipping meals because you don’t feel hungry, you may find that your energy levels and physical health are declining.

Not taking care of yourself during stressful situations can make it harder for you to get through them.

Stressful situations can be easier to handle when you have others that can help support you throughout it. This could be close friends and family that you trust with the personal details of your life. Or, it could be a support group of people who have gone through similar situations to what you’re going through.

There really isn’t a right or wrong person that you can turn to for support, as long as it’s someone trustworthy and able to provide you with a listening ear or wise advice.

If you find that you don’t have anyone to turn to during this time, talking with a therapist can be helpful. Or, if you do have a good support system in place, you may still find it helpful to talk to a therapist who has the education and experience to guide you in the right direction.

Therapists, such as those at BetterHelp, can work with you to help you healthily navigate through stressful times. You don’t have to struggle through it alone.

Other Commonly Asked Questions

How do you handle stressful situations interview questions?

What are five ways to deal with a stressful situation?

What are 10 ways to cope with stress?

How do you handle difficult situations at work answer?

How you handled a difficult situation example?

How do you handle a situation?

Can you tell me about a difficult work situation?

How do you work under pressure?

How do you deal with difficult problems?

How did you handle a difficult situation interview question?

How to Deal with Stressful Situations, Proactively!

Listen to this Podcast

Stream this episode

Get this episode

SUMMARY

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

Free Book!

My blog readers get a complimentary copy of my new book High Performance Habits, while supplies last! I bought 1000 for you – so no charge for the book itself – but I do ask you pay your shipping. While supplies last. Get yours here.

High Performance Planner!

This is the 2-in-1 planner and journal achievers use to win the day and accelerate long-term success. Get yours here (while supplies last)!

DID YOU KNOW?

I give weekly prizes, gratitude and shout-outs to our students, so post a screenshot or video on Instagram and use #TheBrendonShow! I can’t wait to hear your thoughts about this episode!

RELATED POSTS

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of The Brendon Show. Please note that this episode, like all TBS episodes, features Brendon speaking extemporaneously–he is unscripted and unedited. Filmed in one take, The Brendon Show has become one of the most viewed unscripted, direct-to-camera self-help series in the history of YouTube. It has also been the #1 Podcast in all of iTunes and is regularly in the top podcasts in Self-Help and Health categories around the globe. Subscribe to the free motivational podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.)

People ask me, “Brendon, how do you deal with stressful situations so you don’t freak out or have a ton of anxiety and fear leading up to them?” Because maybe you have a big public speaking engagement coming up, or maybe you have that test at school coming up, or maybe you’re about to have that difficult conversation with somebody where you’ve wanted to say something to them, but you’ve been holding back, and you know it’s going to freak you out when you go to tell them the truth. Whenever we’re in situations that we know are going to bring us stress, it really is on us to prepare our absolute best so that A) we deal with them well and we can actually enjoy the experience or go through the experience without freaking out but B) we don’t freak out the energy of everybody else, right?

Because in all of the storms of life, it is our job to be the calm amid the storm.

But that’s hard and that takes skill and that takes training.

So I’ve got four big ideas for you in this Brendon Show episode.

1. Anticipate Difficulties and Ask Others

Number one: Always anticipate and ask others how to deal with stressful situations.
I know that’s a “no—duh” one, but most people do not do that. Right? You’re about to go take your first SAT test ever, what do you do?

Well, you study, you study, you study, you go and you take it. But that’s going to be a stressful situation. Why wouldn’t you first anticipate, ”Wow, that is going to cause a lot of anxiety for me. The days before, the day of—I’m going to be freaking out waiting for my scores.”

Why would you not ask people who’ve already taken it? What did you do the day before the test? To calm yourself down, to get yourself ready? The day of the test, what did you do? When you went in there, did you have a certain breathing pattern? How did you calm yourself down? What did you tell yourself so that you could deal with the situation?

All right, same thing—you’re about to go have a difficult conversation with your spouse, or your partner, or the person you love. Why wouldn’t you ask other people who you know? Be like, “Hey, I’m about to have this difficult conversation. Have you ever had a conversation like that? Oh, what did you say? How did you bring it up?

Like, the idea that so many people in this world go into everyday bumbling into it— I feel sad for them. They’re living a highly reactive life and they’re setting themselves up for incredible failure.

Because if you don’t anticipate the emotions that you’re going to have in stressful situations, I promise the situation is going to win, not you.

So, always anticipate—okay, this is going to be hard. This conversation. This test. This day. This thing. It’s going to be hard. Anticipate it—it will be hard. “Now, who has gone through it before who I can ask how they dealt with it?”

That’s the first strategy.

2. Plan Your Stress Management

Second strategy: I need you to make a pre, during, and post stress-management plan. Huge phrase, friend, I know! But what I think is, “Okay, if I’m going to go have that difficult experience in my life, I’m going to plan, really plan the day before, the day of, and the day after. I’m really going to think through it.”

So let’s say you’re going to have that difficult conversation with somebody you love. Ok, the day before I’m going to say, “Okay. Well the night before, I’m going to ask myself these questions. I’m going to rehearse a little bit. The morning of, I’m going to breathe. I’m going to close my eyes. I’m going to visualize it going just fine, everything is going to be fine. If they say this, I’ll say that.” In other words, I’m going to role play it in my mind, over and over and over again. And afterwards, “Oh! How would I follow up with them to make them feel good? How would I follow? Or what would be my next right steps after that?” Right?

I have a friend right now who is just an unbelievable professional rock-climber. Right? And this person was going to go climb one of the hardest climbs in the world. And I said, “Man, that would terrify me because I hate heights. How did you prepare for that? He says, “Oh, well you know my regular routine is like this.” I said, “Yeah, but what do you do the day before?” And he had like five or six things he did, the day before to get himself mentally and emotionally and physically ready. Including doing a lot of mobility training, a lot of breathing and calming activities, a lot of visualization, going over his notes about where each hold was. It was unbelievable.

The day of—that morning—he got up, he went through a very basic routine; he had been running for weeks and weeks, but he added other little elements too that he knew he was going to do in advance, including calling his spouse and saying, “I love you, honey.” You know? Because he’s about to climb up a mountain. And then, the day after—because here’s what we often don’t think—stress has a longer shelf life than we think. What I mean by that is—let’s say you go do something and it’s really stressful.

That energy carries with you the next day. So, what can you do the next day to calm yourself down? For example, many of you guys have been to my seminars before out in the world, right? Maybe you come to High Performance Academy, or HPX, or
Influencer, or one of our big programs. And I know that delivering that training, it takes four days of my life. I’m on stage anywhere from seven to 14 hours a day, depending on the event, and standing up that whole time. Delivering that seminar is one of the hardest things I do in the world.

Well, guess what? I’ve got to plan my stress-management after that, because after it, my adrenals are all blown out, I’m exhausted, and I’m thinking, “Ok, I’ve got to recover from this.” So, I plan my recovery well in advance of that situation.

So, what can you do before, during, and after to put yourself in a good place, so that you can really deal with the stress?

3. Visualize and Role Model

Number three: I do need you to visualize and role model over and over and over again. I know I reference this a little bit when I talk about what to do during the stressful situation or the day of. I think it’s incredibly important that if you know you have something stressful coming up, that you visualize it, over and over and over again. That you play it in your mind over and over and over again. But here’s the difference, okay?

Fear mongering or worrying is thinking about it and seeing it go bad every single time.

Visualizing is seeing you showing up confident, capable, doing a good job.

Confident, capable, doing a good job. I want you—every single time—visualization should be a positive thinking exercise, where you’re seeing the situation and you’re seeing yourself handle it well. But you’re also noticing the things that are difficult. What if they say this or what if they say that? And you’re kind of like, scenario-planning. If she says this, then I’ll say that. If he does this, then I’ll do that. But keep the momentum going and visualize the thing all the way through, right?

My friend, the rock climber, he doesn’t just visualize the start of the climb. He visualizes the entire climb until he’s standing on top of the rock and there’s success. So I want you to visualize the entire scenario.

What most people do is, they visualize a little bit of the scenario, they feel anxiousness and worry, so they stop visualizing. Or they catastrophize. They start seeing it going bad, bad, bad, and they never walk the entire thing through. Right? I want you to walk the entire thing through. See the entire thing and force yourself to see it going well.

Force yourself to see it going well.

Then I want you to pair it with role modeling. I want you to call up a friend, call up somebody else you know, say, “Hey, I’m about to have this conversation. I’m about to go do this thing. Uh, can I ask you some questions and try this out?” Sound it out, act it out, explore it with other people.

There are very few things I do in my life that I haven’t already talked with somebody through; right before my meetings, before my conversations, before all my online courses, I’ll sit down and literally try out the words on people. “What do you think of this? What do you think of that?”

And I’ll get feedback from them and that makes me think more deeply about it. And when I think more deeply about it, suddenly the stress isn’t so front of house. Because in my mind, I’m already prepared. Like preparation can get rid of a lot of stress. But role-modeling puts you in that actual environment where you’re doing the thing. Then when you show up you’re like, “Wow, my mind has seen this a thousand times. I’ve already talked and acted it out, let’s go!” And now it’s not so stressful.

4. Enroll Your Friends

Fourth big idea: Enroll your friends. If you’ve got something coming up, like your SATs, your ACTs, a test—create study groups. Don’t go it alone. Create a study group with some friends where you guys create a regular schedule where you’re studying and you’re getting ready together. Right? That camaraderie of things. Same thing—if you’re going to go run a marathon and it’s going to be this big scary thing, it’s your first marathon ever. If you’ve been running with a group of people, they know by science that no doubt, you will perform better and less anxiously because you’ve prepared with other people.

Almost everything you do in your life, you should think: How do I enroll friends or find peers to do this with so I stay on the journey? When you have friends or others involved, we know from social sciences that you’re more likely to stay committed, stay consistent, and succeed.

We’re in a society of selfies where we only think of ourselves, and we only—like, because we’re scared to ask for help, or be vulnerable and say, “I don’t know,” we do everything ourselves. And everything I ever do, I literally sit down—here’s my goal list. Anytime I write down goals, I don’t just write down, ‘When is it going to happen? What’s my next step? When is the deadline?’ Instead, I also write next to it, and I say, “Who can I enroll with me on this goal?”

Get people enrolled with you in your goals. Get people enrolled with you, so you can role play with them, ask, participate. Go through it with them, it’s not so scary.

I know you know this if you’ve ever been to the county fair. I’m from Montana, so we always had the county fair, and there’d be these big, huge, scary rides when I was a kid. I never went on a ride by myself as a kid. Never once. I’d go grab my buddy and be like, “Hey! You’re coming along with me.” And he’d go, “What, are you kidding? I’m not going to!” He didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to go. But when we said, “Let’s go together,” we got on that zipper, we got flipped around and kicked around, and we loved it. And we only did it because we did it together.

You will face greater stresses and greater fears when you go at it together.

I hope this serves you, my friend. I want to thank you again for being part of our HPX community. I love having you guys here.

HPX stands for the High Performance Experience. It just means, you know what, there’s another level of life experience available to you when you prepare, when you think things through, when you challenge yourself to be your absolute best, when you show up each and every day, and you say, “I’m going to be vibrant today.
I’m going to be connected to other people. I’m going to make a difference.” And I know that’s why you’re here, so thank you for being here.

Make sure you subscribe. Share this video with somebody going through a stressful situation today. I’ll see you next time.

General Adaptation Syndrome

How your body copes with stressful situations and adapts to survive them.

Throughout human evolution, our survival has been contingent on an ability to survive life-threatening situations — from being hunted by predators to recovering from illnesses.

But how do we become consciously aware that a situation is dangerous so that we might adapt to (and survive) it?

Often, we are first alerted that a situation is threatening by one of the side effects of stress — our heart rate increases, for example, and we become aware goosebumps on the skin, amongst other physical symptoms.

A Vienna-born endocrinologist by name of Hans Selye (1907-1982) was the first scientist to single out these side effects and to identify them collectively as being the result of ‘stress’ — a term that we use routinely today, but which did not even exist until less than 100 years ago.

Whilst conducting experiments relating to hormone production, Selye noticed that his subjects showed a similar set of side effects regardless of the type of life-threatening stimulus that researchers presented to them.

Seyle termed this collection of responses general adaptation syndrome (GAS), a 3-stage set of physiological processes which prepare, or adapt, the body for danger so that we ready to stand a better chance of surviving it compared to if we remained passively relaxed when faced with a threat.

Discovery of GAS

Who was Hans Selye?

Hans Selye was born in Vienna, Austro-Hungary in 1907. He graduated with an MD from the German University of Prague in 1929, received a PhD in 1931 and the following year, accepted a position at McGill University in Montreal, Canada to continue his biochemistry research.

Whilst at McGill, in a 1926 article in Nature entitled, “A Syndrome produced by Diverse Nocuous Agents”, he identified a set of symptoms of being exposed to various threats in rats as general adaptation syndrome, and later labelled “stress” as we understand it today. Selye died in Montreal in 1982 at the age of 75.

General adaptation syndrome was discovered accidentally by Selye whilst he was conducting experiments on rats at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

In a 1926 letter to Nature, Selye described the findings of a series of experiments on rats, in which the animals were subjected to numerous stressors, which he referred to as “nocuous agents”, including exposure to cold temperatures, injection with various toxins and being forced to endure excessive physical exertion (Selye, 1926). 1 He then observed the physiological responses to these stressful situations.

Selye noted that regardless of the type of shock the rats were exposed to, a similar set of symptoms could be observed shortly afterwards, indicating that the reaction was not to a specific stimulus but part of a more general reaction to stressful situations.

Selye went on to identify three distinct stages of general adaptation syndrome — the initial alarm reaction stage which occurs shortly after the stressful event, followed by a resistance stage, during which body’s Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) resists the impact of the stressful stimulus, and finally, if the stress continues, the exhaustion stage, when the body fails to cope with the distressing stimulus.

Stage 1: Alarm Reaction

The alarm reaction stage is the first sign of general adaptation syndrome and occurred in Selye’s rats between 6 and 48 hours following the introduction of the “nocuous agent”.

During this stage, the sympathetic branch of the ANS is activated — the adrenal gland secretes the stress hormone cortisol, along with adrenaline, and Selye observed that the rats’ bodies underwent significant physical changes, including a reduction in bodily fat and the shrinking of numerous organs, including the liver and thymus and lymph glands. The body temperature was also lowered, conserving energy (Selye, 1926).

The alarm reaction stage prepares animals for a fight-or-flight response — a term coined by Walter Cannon to describe our reaction to a stressful event. The body adapts to be able to react quickly in either fleeing or confronting the threat posed to them.

In Depth Stress: Fight or Flight Response

Stage 2: Resistance

After the initial reaction to the stressor during the alarm reaction stage, the parasympathetic branch of the ANS counteracts the changes that the stressful stimulus has produced, and attempts to restore a state of homeostasis, the default state in which the body functions normally.

This stage, in which the body tries to adapt to the new situation, is referred to as the resistance stage. Selye found that it occurred in the rats typically 48 hours following the stressful event.

During the resistance stage, the results of the hormonal changes which occurred in the previous stage are still apparent, including increased glucose levels in the blood and and higher blood pressure, but stress hormone levels begin to return to normal, enabling the body’s focus to shift from alertness to repair.

Stage 3: Exhaustion

The final phase of general adaptation syndrome is the exhaustion stage, in which the body has depleted resources following its attempt to repair itself during the preceding resistance stage. If the original threat has passed, it will continue its recovery.

However, the body no longer has the energy to cope with continued stress in the long term, and should it continue, it begins to show signs of exhaustion, gradually deteriorating as it persists.

A Short-Term Survival Strategy?

The limited resources and energy that the body has to cope with stressful situations means that general adaptation syndrome has evolved to be only useful to animals’ survival in the short term — that is, if the threat does not persist, leading to exhaustion.

For example, a rush of adrenaline might enable prey to flee an approaching predator, but the persistent stress of being hunted continuously for days would be difficult to adapt to in the long term.

Individual Differences

Selye himself acknowledged that stress impacts each individual differently (Selye, 1950). 2 What one person considers to be a severely stressful situation, another person may experience as only mildly distressing.

The GAS may also be manipulated by training — on experiencing stress on a regular basis, our bodies adapt to cope with it.

This ability to manipulation our stress response is particularly useful for endurance sports and affects how athletes train for strenuous competitions. For instance, a long-distance runner may undergo endurance training in order to adapt to, and cope with, the stress of longer periods of physical exertion (Kraemer and Ratamess, 2004). 3