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Tension in Daily Life
We live in an age of tensions and because we are confronted with more & more situations that produce stress, increasing numbers of people at younger ages are suffering from hypertension which results in high blood-pressure, heart-attacks & premature deaths. Everywhere we are cursed with colour war, communal strife & religious riots; politicians' endeavour to make our life miserable with missionary zeal; atomic weapons continue to pile up threatening the very existence of hu-manity, but our most pernicious anxiety involves more common problems of daily life such as the daily commute in a congested city, rising cost of living, unabating shortages of daily necessities, polluted air and water. These and many other insoluble difficulties appear to have been built into our daily life.
The existence of mental stress as a part of modern living has been universally accepted. Frequent stressful situations affect us, not only psychologically, but also undermine our physical health. While we are quite familiar with the stress we face, our knowledge about their deadly consequences is very meagre. What is stress? How does it affect our blood-pres. suee? Can we measure and quantify its effect on our mental state? It is not easy to answer these and such other questions.
Modus Operandi of Stress
Though it has always been commonly accepted that emotions such as anger, fear and anxiety play an important role in causing hypertension, etc., our knowledge about its actual process had been quite indequate until a few years ago. We shall, therefore, devote some space here to the modus operandi of the acute and chronic stressful situations in producing psychosomatic maladies. Any condition that needs behavioural adjustment could be regarded as stressful situation. Whenever, one encounters such a situation an innate mechanism is automatically put into action. Thereby, conditions which are not conducive to the normal optimal functioning of the autonomic nervous system are brought about. It
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