Understanding Stress: The CMHA Stress Kit

Canadian Mental Health Association: Cochrane-Timiskaming Branch

What is your Stress Index?

Stress can be difficult to understand. The emotional chaos it causes can make our daily lives miserable. It can also decrease our
physical health, sometimes drastically. Strangely, we are not always aware that we are under stress. The habits, attitudes, and signs that can alert us to problems may be hard to recognize because they have become so familiar.

How high is your Stress Index? Find out by taking the interactive quiz below:

The effects of stress on our lives can be debillitating: it's important to understand stress and how you can cope.

To understand stress, we need to look at the events that occur, our thoughts about them, and the way we respond.

Stressors : Situations that are considered stress-provoking are known as stressors.

There are many major events that occur in our lives: moving, leaving school, changing jobs, and experiencing losses. These "life events" can be stress-provoking. We also face many "daily hassles". These are events that occur routinely. They also contribute to the levels of stress that we experience. Daily hassles include events such as being stuck in traffic, deadlines, conflicts with family members, or dealing with busy city life. Between life events and day-to-day hassles, we are faced with many stress-provoking situations each day. Our attitude towards these situations determines our response.

Coping effectively requires an understanding of the situations we perceive to be stressful. What day-to-day hassles of life events have you experienced recently?

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