Searcher-Stress

This week’s topic interested me greatly because stress is something that everyone deals with in some way. Being in college stress is just a typical everyday thing. Much of the time I feel as though a good chunk of my stress comes from balancing my schoolwork and my social life. It is hard to find a good balance of both, especially being in a sorority where we often have a lot of events. I have to be smart as to which I choose to go to and which I choose not to go to. I do believe that stress can be a good thing, but too much of it can be detrimental to your health. That is another topic that I found fascinating about stress, is that it can actually cause physical harms to your health. This week I found two articles relating to stress.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-dick/social-networks-and-stress_b_3534170.html

The first article talks about social media and the effect it has on stress. They did a study of people who are on social media compared to people who are not on social media and found that social media users are 14 percent more likely to classify their lives as “somewhat stressful” and on top of that non-social media users are 28 percent more likely to say their lives are not stressful. Being an avid social media user, this made me think a lot about if being on social media is only causing more stress to myself. The article also talks about the possible causes of this stress and I found the idea that the lack of privacy is what drives up our stress. I never thought about that before. This related to the movie we watched because the movie talked a lot about social rank and how that effects you and social rank can be seen in social media too in regards to how many friends you have, or how many likes you get on something which only adds to stress. 

http://www.mayoclinic.org/stress/art-20046037

The second article that I found, talked about the evolution of stress and how it was originally that idea of “fight or flight” yet now we don’t really need that kind of stress very often. It went into detail about when your fight or flight stress is there long term and that is when you experience the health symptoms such as weight gain, heart disease, etc. This relates to the movie we watched in class because the talked a lot about what stress can do to your body, and even inside of your body with regards to telomeres. This article also talks about the effects of stress on your body.