Hello, everyone, and welcome to this discussion about stress. I'm speaking to you from Ontario, Canada, I could be speaking to you from anywhere, and the information wouldn't change much. I'm assuming that you're taking this this session because you have some questions about stress, possibly because you're feeling stress. And probably because you'd like to understand a bit more about stress and what you can actually do about it. So let's start with some facts about stress. Um, I just checked into some of the research online.

The American Psychological Association, did a survey in 2019 tells us that more than three quarters of adults responded reported physical or emotional symptoms of stress. And those are headache feeling tired changes and sleeping habits. Nearly half of those adults said at least once during the past month, they have laid awake at night because of stress from Canadian statistics again, survey from Statistics Canada 12 years and over number of people and percentage of the survey respondents who experienced stress and categories were most days quite a bit are extremely stressful. And the number of people who feel stress in Canada, six and a half million in total which is between 20 and 29% of the adult age group from 18 to 64. And then fortunately, for seniors, the amount of stress does decrease a little bit so that it's down to about one in 10. Seniors experiencing stress.

Does it make a difference if you have spare time versus if you're always running? Sure does. For people who are always on the run 50% of them, I frequently experience stress another 35 sometimes experienced stress and only one in 10 say rarely or never. Whereas if you have enough time to kind of plan your activities and the pace of your life down to about half as many people who frequently experience stress. So that tells us that time is one factor, but certainly not the whole story. And if we go worldwide, what do we find out that a high percentage of workers experienced stress on the job and that 42% of workers say that they see that their co workers need help with stress.

International Research tells us that there's stress in the workplace is rising, with six in 10 workers in major global economies experience workplace stress. And in China, the statistic is extremely high 85% Have workers experienced stress in the workplace? In Australia 91% of adult Australians claim to feel stress in at least one important area of their lives and almost 50% feel very stressed about one aspect of their life. Many workers in Britain believed that they were experiencing work related stress at a level so high that it was making them ill. And there is lots of research to tie stress with physical illness. The World Health Organization has become concerned enough about it to say that this is a worldwide epidemic. And when we talk about epidemics, that should be a signal, then it's time to take action to do something.

To make some changes on every level, individually, in your communities, in your countries and globally, what exactly is stress? And what do we mean by stress? We're going to talk about this over the next few minutes. One of the things we know is that everyone experiences stress every day. Stress isn't normal. It's part of living, it's part of growing, it's part of developing it's part of coping, and positive stress, which is one form of stress has important benefits in our lives.

So the stress response is biological, in the sense that there are changes in our, or functions bodily functions that we'll talk about, but I wanted to emphasize first, that positive stress response is normal. It's essential, and it has brief biological changes brief changes to our heart rate and mild elevations in hormone levels. And those chemical responses that are short term are serving a purpose. Positive stress can be defined as a time when you perceive an stressful situation as an opportunity as an opportunity that will lead to a good outcome. Positive stress is a reaction we have. When we're faced with the demand that we can handle that we know we have the resources and the ability to handle.

Positive stress is also a spark that can push your body to its limits in order to achieve a certain goal and athletes know this variable Well, and positive stress can be the motivator to change our thinking or our behavior. When you feel a positive stress, it encourages you to act, it encourages you to do something. I'll give you a quick example of what for me, I'm trying to keep as positive stress. And that's the sign of household clutter. So rather than let it get me down, I tried to get it to be a motivator to help me think about changing my behavior, getting up away from my TV or my computer screen and doing some physical action that will actually change that that positive stressor and make my house a little tinier. Maybe you can relate The stress response is a biological response.

And it's a by mind and body response. When we get a sense of danger of threat of a situation that's not safe, then our body decides that it needs to protect us, our brain decides that it needs to protect us. And so, like many of the animal kingdom, we have a stress response. And it's called and it's very familiar to many of you, I'm sure fight or flight because the brain is trying to keep you save it. It changes the body chemicals in a way that prepares you to either fight if you must, or run, if you can. If the brain perceives that you can't fight or run, then it's possible that it will also invoke a freeze response, which instead of escalating their bodies, on chemicals, it de escalates them.

And that's you go almost into a shutdown stage. Okay, so here is the visual picture of that biological stress reaction. rapid heart rate, rapid breathing, that hyper alertness, the tense muscles, the high blood pressure, the preparation for fight or flight. The experts who studies stress And then talking about a group at Harvard University, at this point, distinguish between three different levels of stress response. So these are different levels of bodily reaction to stress. So again, if we talk about the positive stress, we're looking at the mild elevations in stress hormones.

If we move down to tolerable stress, we're looking at fairly serious levels of biological changes in heart rate in blood pressure in muscle tension. But again, these are temporary, not brief, but temporary. And they can be really Do start or the impact can be reduced if there are supportive relationships being people being with you, talking to you, supporting you through it. And a third level of stress, which is the one we need really to worry about is called toxic stress. And that's when your stress response systems are activated. And in the absence of solutions in the absence of protective relationships, they stay activated and we can talk about people being in a chronic state of stress.

Here is the comparison for a person in chronic stress instead of that, at brief or short term increased heart rate, prolonged increased heart rate possible damage to heart arteries blood vessels, blood pressure stays up. muscle tension and muscles ready to react become muscle and joint pain. stomach and digestive problems occur because of the increased stress hormones in your body. And even more problematic, or the effects it has on the prefrontal cortex the thinking part of your brain where it will be very difficult to problem solve, to manage your behaviors so that you'll do a lot more impulsive things. be easily distracted from whatever you're trying to achieve. cognitive functions like listening and memory are impacted.

A physical symptom is also the headaches that build up in a stressed out brain. And again from Harvard, extensive research on the biology of stress now shows that healthy development can be derailed by excessive or prolonged activation of the stress response systems in the body. And that can start in childhood, but it can occur at any stage of life. toxic stress has damaging effects on learning behavior and health. And it continues can continue across the lifespan. Okay, and I just want to also make an important point about these three different categorizations of stress.

What we're categorizing is not The degree of the stress event, it's the degree that your body responds to the stress event. And we all know that people respond very differently to stress. So it's important to realize that your positive responses to stress can occur even in a scenario that's very disruptive or dangerous. If you are able to very quickly pursue perceive a way out of it tolerable. stresses can occur from something as simple as worrying about good marks to things as significant as trying to leave a difficult relationship. And again, it's not Which of those is more difficult to manage?

It's how your body responds to those. And the same thing for toxicity. Some people cope with adversity with marvelous resilience and positive strategies, whereas other people really do lapse into that toxicity that keeps them anxious and struggling in a chronic way. So again, when we're looking at this, the situation is not what we're labeling when we're labeling positive, tolerable or toxic, but the way the body responds to it. I think people may also be aware that time We do have high high high levels of anxiety in our population today. And anxiety is an interesting kind of stress.

Because often, it's not based on a real danger or a real threat. But again, a perceived danger or threat. But the problem is that when we start to worry about that rather than problem solve it, the dangerous consequence of anxiety is the carrying of that anxiety and the rethinking the anxious thoughts so that they continue to trigger the stress response. Even maybe, after the stressor has been resolved, might be a lot of second guessing might be a lot of should I have Could I have all of that kind of And the anxious thoughts that we don't know how to rid ourselves of can be just as much of a problem as a real threat or a perceived threat itself. So lots to think about the good news. And I will say Rest assured, there's so much you can do to manage your stress levels.

And in the next session, I will be starting to address some of those for you