Definition of Stress

Excerpted from of All Stressed Up and Everywhere to Go! Solutions to De-Stressing Your Life and Recovering Your Sanity

© Copyright 2011 by Relationship Resources. All Rights Reserved.

Stress affects all of us, and a joyful, productive life depends on having skills for handling it well. God’s Word provides the strategies we need to manage stress well.

We can’t choose whether we’ll have stress, but we can choose how it affects us. It can either be a curse—and harm us, or it can be a blessing—and we can thrive in the midst of it.

Before we begin working on specific strategies to manage our stress, we need to look at several issues that are necessary for understanding stress.

What is stress?

• Stress is defined as: Our response as a whole person to any demand.
• Stressor is defined as: Any demand put on us that causes stress.

Please read those definitions again. Often people confuse stress with stressors. Many think that stress is only the stressors we experience. In fact, that is only a small part of our stress.

Secular views, such as Hans Selye’s, see stress as only a physical response. A biblical perspective on stress views it as affecting the whole person—

• spiritually
• emotionally
• physically
• mentally
• socially

Psalm 31:9-11 is a great example, “Be merciful to me, O LORD, for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and my body with grief. My life is consumed by anguish
and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak. … I am the utter contempt of my neighbors; I am a dread to my friends.”

What are some stressors you are dealing with right now? What stress management techniques are you using right now that are helping you?

If you don’t have your own copy of All Stressed Up and Everywhere to Go!, you can get a digital copy at www.Stress-Management-Tips.us.  It is available in paperback and in digital form.  You can get 25% off on any format by using the discount code PTL25 in the shopping cart.