Psychology · Ch 3 — Meeting Life Challenges
Sources of Stress
Sources of Stress
Sources of Stress
Stress does not come from a single source. A wide range of events and conditions can generate it, and psychologists classify these sources into three broad categories: major life events, the daily hassles of everyday life, and traumatic events.
Major Life Events
Changes — both big and small, sudden and gradual — affect our lives from the moment we are born. We learn to cope with small, everyday changes, but major life events can be particularly stressful because they disturb our routine and cause upheaval. These events may be planned (e.g. moving into a new house) or unpredicted (e.g. the break-up of a long-term relationship). When several such events occur within a short period of time, we find it difficult to cope and become more prone to the symptoms of stress.
The death of a loved one, personal injury or illness, and failure in an examination are examples of major life events that generate significant stress.
Measuring Life Events: The Holmes and Rahe Approach
Holmes and Rahe developed a life event measure of stress. For the Indian population, a version called the Presumptive Stressful Life Events Scale was developed by Singh, Kaur and Kaur. It is a self-rating questionnaire made up of fifty-one life changes that a person may have experienced. Each life event is assigned a numerical value in terms of its severity (the mean stress score). Both positive and negative events are included, because both kinds of changes cause stress. The respondent's stress score is the weighted sum of all the items or life change events they have checked for the past one year.
Some sample items from this measure are:
| Life Event | Mean Stress Score |
|---|---|
| Death of a close family member | 66 |
| Unexpected accident or trauma | 53 |
| Illness of a family member | 52 |
| Break-up with friend | 47 |
| Appearing for examinations | 43 |
| Change in eating habits | 27 |
The mean number of stressful life events experienced over a period of one year without producing overt physical or mental illness is approximately two. However, the correlations between life events and susceptibility to any particular illness is low, indicating a weak association between life events and stress. It has been debated whether life events cause some stress-related illness or whether stress caused the life events and the illness. The impact of most life events varies from person to person. Factors such as the age at which the event was first experienced, frequency of occurrence, duration of the stressful event, and social support must be studied when evaluating the relationship between stressful life events and subsequent illness.
Hassles
Hassles are the personal stresses we endure as individuals due to the happenings in our daily life. These include noisy surroundings, commuting, quarrelsome neighbours, electricity and water shortage, traffic snarls, and so on. Attending to various emergencies is a daily hassle experienced by a housewife. There are some jobs in which daily hassles are very frequent. …