Stress of Life

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The Stress of Life, written by an endocrinologist Hans Selye, explains the basis of stress and its biological effects on humans. Selye discusses how human body absorbs and reacts to stress, which could be anything from a paper-cut to a loss of a family member. Stress is extremely delicate and complex that it can result from a muscular workout to food hunger; proving that “stress” is not simply a stress in the nervous system, but any demands from the body. Selye explains the stress in biological view and its harmful additives on diseases, such as kidney, heart, and blood vessels. Selye links stress to various diseases, such as nervous and mental diseases, sexual derangement, digestive and metabolic disease, cancer, and aging. Selye also is responsible for discovering general adaptation syndrome, better known as stress syndrome, which is the process of the body encountering stress. Although Selye was criticized at first for his ideas on stress, he is now revered for his breakthrough ideas about stress, which created an entirely new medical field of study. Out of the many books listed on the class syllabus, I chose to read Hans Selye’s The Stress of Life because I found stress very common in life but least understood by majority of individuals, including myself prior to reading this book. At a first glance over the book cover, I expected the book to cover all the various types of stress people encounter in everyday situations and remedies for various types of stress. After all, the book’s title “Stress of Life” brought my senses to believe that the book was mainly on what stress brings into life. However, Hans Selye, not only wrote about the “stresses” in life, but everything else that had to do with stress. He wrote about the history, origin, past beliefs of stress, the concept and theories of stress, and the negative and positive effects of stress. In my opinion,
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