What Are the Causes of Stress?

What Are the Causes of Stress? (1:34)

Stress can be caused by simple things and major events. It can even have a positive effect, says Elissa Epel, PhD, associate professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. In this video, she discusses our top stressors.

Read Transcript

There's all sorts of, types of stressers that we deal with. The minor hassles of rushing somewhere, to the major event of coping with loss, or traumatic events. Stresses also, can be thought of as good stress, because it motivates us at a certain level, and when we have a challenge in front of us, we activate the stress response to help us do better.

And if we feel like we're going to grow from the experience or do well, we actually have a positive stress response, it doesn't do as much damage. There're all sorts of types of stressers, the most common type of stresser that we deal with in modern life, that really gets us is social stress and financial stress.

Social stress causes the more exaggerated emotional reactions, and increases the stress hormones and inflammation, and financial stress, that deep threat to survival, that primitive threat is very toxic, and so the type of executive stress that someone might deal with inhibiting a lot of responsibility, with all lot of resources and power, they do go through stress response everyday, but it's more sympathetic, it's not as much of a quarter dollar defeat responses, someone with chronic stress [xx] economic status probably goes through.