(continued from May issue)

4.1 Concept of Stress

STRESS-INDUCED PROBLEMS AND their MANAGEMENT

When the homeostasis is disturbed, the functions of all the organs get disturbed.

Depending on the type of stress, the nature of the personality and the hereditary pre dispositions, these disturbances may show up initially in the mind as restlessness leading to insomnia. A man with many responsibilities and problems at work can find some time only at night when he is all alone to open out his internal library, where he has accumalated and suppressed several of his emotional upsurges. It is a common experience that the problems keep recurring in the mind like in a defective recorded tape that his brain can never switch-off and go to sleep, resulting in insomnia. Lack of sleep could itself cause several diseases in course of time.

The great emotional sharpening and sensitisation can lead to different forms of neuroses like anxiety neurosis, phobias, obsessions, hypochon- driasis, etc. As man cannot bear this tension he may take to drugs to benumb the nerves and thus the problems of drug addiction mount up. Today it is difficult to see a man walking in the streets of New York who is not under the effect of one on the other of these psychedelic drugs. When stress upsets the balance of a man it may result in his suffering from physical aliments too. High blood pressure is a typical example. Repeated upsurges of blood pressure in the long run can remain as a cause of high blood pressure with all its complications.

(to be continued in the next issue)