How Much Stress Is Stressful?

Stress is unavoidable but how much stress is safer and how men and women react to the same type and intensity of stress is a never ending debate. The present study is designed on this basis. The effect of mental stress with and without harassment in age matched males and females (15 each) on the cardiovascular parameters viz systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), mean arterial pressure (MAP) and heart rate (HR) was assessed. Mental arithmetic without and with verbal harassment was the tool of mental stress. SBP, DBP and HR were recorded before and after the mental task by using automatic digital BP apparatus (OMRAN) and MAP were calculated from these values. The data were analyzed in SPSS version 17.0 using Students‟ t‟ test with a significance level at p < 0.05. The results revealed that there was no significant change in all the parameters after harassment-free mental stress while harassment-induced mental stress increased all the parameters in both the genders. However, men and women responded in a similar way, ie., there was no significant difference in the findings between men and women. The reason for this may be that the mechanism involved in bringing out these effects is the same in both the genders i.e. stimulation of the limbic system that processes the psychological stress. In conclusion, stress as it is, is not harmful but combined effect of more than one stress at a time is the threat to the physiological functions.