Ling Li(Lydia)

MGT713

Professor Hassey

9/21/2015

Reflection Paper 1: stress is positive or negative?

For today’s society, due to the fiercely competitive occupation, people

have to face many kinds of problems in their lives; this can make them to have

deep stress in their lives, such as anxiety, tension and conflict etc., so stress is

part of our lives. After read chapter 2, I think there are two different stresses:

negative and positive stress. In my word, negative stress is a bad stress for

people, it makes people feel that they cannot achieve their goal or they are not

assertive people and so on. However, positive stress can encourage people to

finish their tasks at their peak level and make them to be fulfilled; positive stress

can also offer opportunities for people, to gain things. I will talk about the

differences between them and give you some examples show how they impact

people.

Stress is a very common problem in our society, everyone faces it at

everywhere, like workshops, schools and families etc. When we mentioned the

word “stress”, most of us think that it is a negative terms. However, not all of

them are negative, there is also positive stress that you can get achievement

from it, such as buying a new home, having a baby or having a vacation etc.

These activities make us feel excited and improve our performance. For

example, having a baby can be an excited and challenging thing, but also make

people to feel a lot of stress, like financial situation, new role and physical

changing etc. However, you will be most willing to bear all of this, because you

love the baby who will coming to the world later, because you want to see the

baby who will be your family member. You will be perfectly happy to have this

baby, even though you are under too much pressure. Positive stress happened is

not just in our personnel lives, it also emerged in an organization. For example,

great performance in an organization is a consequence of organization stress.

Why I said it is a stress. Because when you want to get your boss’s attention,

and get promotion in your organization, you have to have a perfect performance

and show your talent to your leader. This can make you have a great pressure to

do your work, because you are scared of doing wrong or make mistakes.

However, this stress also can make you achieve your goal and make a

confidence in your organization. Therefore, it is said to be positive stress that can

encourage you to be a hard working person.

Even though, we can obtain good experience by positive stress, we have

to deal with negative stress most of our times. Negative stress is like a distress

for us; we try to avoid it by perform well, but it is useless. Negative stress occurs

when our body cannot feel relaxed, like headache, trembling, depression etc.

There are also two types of negative stress, one is in our personnel life, such as

the death of a spouse or closed family members, divorcing, conflict in

interpersonal relationships etc.; another type is in an organization, such as

conflict with colleagues or supervisors, excessive job demands, lack of training

etc. I will give two example respectively to show why I think it is negative stress.

First, the negative stress in our personnel lives, like death of family members.

This matter will affect bad impact to your physical situation, like eating less,

insomnia, weakness etc. More seriously, it will cause psychological problems like

anxiety, panic, depression and obsessive-compulsive etc. And in general, people

have to find methods to cope with this situation. For example, you can talk with

your intimate friends; you can take a swim in the pool and walks with your

spouse to relieve your pain. For the negative stress in an organization, I prefer to

give an example about having conflict with other members. All we know that

major disagreements, or heated arguments can cause conflict with other

members in an organization, it will result in unhappiness and inefficiency on your

work. This is long time stress, because you have to work with your colleagues

several years, even lifetime until one of you retire. As a result, we have to figure

out how to get along with co-workers, such as having a communication or

discussing your opinions and so on.

About me, I get stressed all the time, they are also can be divided into two

types: positive and negative aspects. For the positive respect, I get stressed at

study. Because of my parents’ high expectation at scores, I am under great

pressure to study abroad. Even though I have to suffer from it, it is a motivation

that simulate me to study hard, to get high grade. At the same time, I also have

to work out a way to reduce my stress. For instance, one thing that helps me to

have less stress is exercising, it also can make me to be healthier; getting

enough sleep also is an effective way for me. On the other hand, I also

experience negative stress, like having conflict with my roommates in my

personnel life. For example, my roommates used to hold party every weekend,

but I am not a “party person”. I would rather to stay in my room to watch movie or

do my homework on the weekend. Thus, my roommates and I always had

conflict from it. At the beginning, we did not pay much attention on it, we just did

not talk to each other’s, or having brawls. Neither of us did not want to

communicate with each other, so this made me feel unhappy and embarrass all

the time. Eventually, we realized that the best way to eliminate the stress is to

negotiate with each other. So, having a conflict with my roommates could result

in a long time stress. If we keep that state, our physical and psychological

situation both will be influenced and changed to a bad situation.

All in all, stress is a big problem in our society, everyone has a lot of stress

in their lives. However, stress not just have negative aspect, it also has positive

aspect. The negative stress will affect our normal lives and have bad impact on

our bodies and spirit; the positive stress can make us gain what we want and

what we expect. Furthermore, we also need to learn how to cope with stress.

However, we have to keep in mind that some little stress can be actually good for

us, it can inspire us to perform at our peak level; it is also a challenge to us, and

make us more mature and aware, and ultimately lead success in our lives.