The agents of stress, also known as stressors, can be broadly categorized into three main types:
- Psychological Stressors: These include factors such as anxiety, depression, emotional conflicts, personal relationships, work pressures, and major life changes such as marriage, divorce, birth, and death.
- Environmental Stressors: These are external factors present in an individual's surroundings, such as noise, pollution, bright light, extreme temperatures, natural disasters, and social conflicts like struggles with others or social defeat.
- Biological Stressors: These include physical health issues like chronic illness, injury, hormonal changes, and adverse experiences during development (e.g., prenatal stress exposure, sexual abuse), as well as physiological responses to pain and discomfort.
Additional common sources of stress can include financial problems, parenting challenges, and daily life busyness. Stressors may also arise from struggles related to housing, employment or study pressures, and social factors. In summary, agents of stress encompass a wide range of factors that may be physical, psychological, or environmental in nature. They trigger the body's stress response, involving physiological systems like the autonomic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which release hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol to cope with the stressor.
