Critical Thinking Essay #2

Causes of Stress in Today’s Urban Society

Nowadays, there are lots of people who live in the urban area are stressed of having lots of pressure. According to the American Institute of Stress, “80% of workers feel stress on the job and nearly half say they need help in learning how to manage stress.” But before we get further, stress is a normal physical responds that came from something that makes people feel threatened or upset people’s balance in some ways. For instance, when people are being threatened, their body will automatically responds to stress. At the same time, most people are stress because of their major life events, working pressure, and peer pressure.

First of all, individual’s major life events are one of the main causes of stress. As stated by psychiatrist Drs Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe death of family members is the hardest and stressful moments for an individuals. In fact, everyone always gets their greatest pain when they lost their love ones and this pain will bring them lots of pressure that causes stress. Moreover, people get stress because of their unpleasant past. For example, people who experienced a harsh childhood time and people who had been abused. For some people they can just keep moving on, however, there are lots of people who are being haunted by their painful memories and they are stress because the events in their life. Subsequently, every individual will always have experienced bad thing, but some people, they can never forget their bad memories because it leaves or changed something on them and gave them a great stressful times in their life. As an example, people who experienced a car accident and loose their arms or legs, they will never forget the accident that happened to them and change their whole life which bring them lots of mental pain and putting their life in stress. Therefore, death, unpleasant past, and bad experiences that leave something on individuals are major life events that can cause people in great pain mentally and puts them in stress.

Furthermore, the second main factor of people to get stress is the pressure of their work or jobs. Some people maybe love their jobs, easy, and highly paid jobs, however, these people can still get stress because of commuting. Which is means that they have to travel a long distance from home to work place. For example, people who work as flight attendants, they get a high salary with an easy job but they don’t really have a time to spend with their family and this giving them lots of pressure and it may put them to the stress level. Especially for married people with children. At the same time, pressure and stress that is very common to most people is job insecurity. This kind of pressure and stress are mostly happens to salesmen or women because they don’t have a stable salary and there are lots of competition between salesmen and women. And moreover if their rates of sales are low they will be fired and their salary are depends on how much properties they sell. Furthermore, talking about salary, this is the most common pressure that most people have in their job, which is stress because of low paying job. As matters of fact that there are many people are unemployed and in today’s culture everyone is knowledgeable and experienced, people who are new or weaker can’t find proper job even though they have the same level of education as others. And because of this, there are lots of people suffered from the pressure that their jobs are lowly paid and married people will suffer the most because they don’t have enough money for their family's fund or the worse case is that they can’t pay their mortgage and they will become homeless. Thus, pressure and high level of stress is most commonly come from the work or job pressure which included, the stress of commuting, job insecurity, and low paying jobs.

Besides major life events and work pressure, one of the biggest causes of stress in today’s society is peer pressure. As a human being, people always want to fit in with the groups and they don’t want to be left out of the society. Moreover, not just teenagers get influenced by their peers, yet adults do so. For adults, the most common peer pressure that they can get is the pressure of job dissatisfaction. For example, as adults people will show what they have and show who is better. And for some people they has to be richer or better than other people to fit in the group so they will have lots of pressure and put them self to stress because of their dissatisfaction of their jobs and salary. Other than jobs dissatisfaction, people are most likely pressured by their peers because of their role and status in the work place. For instance, some people may have friends that are all in a high status, and it makes them to believe that if they have power and status, others will respect them and fit into the group. These people will get into lots of pressure and stress because they have to work really hard to get higher role or higher status as their friends had. Furthermore, peer pressure can come from the social life that people committed in. As an example, in a work place there always have weekend party or any other party that contributes only the employees and there are some people who doesn’t like to go for party and by not going to the party they will be left out from other co-workers and this peer pressure can leads to stress. Hence, peer pressure may leads to a great pressure that leads to stress for some people.

In conclusion, stress can happen to an individuals in many ways such as, major life events like death and bad memories of their past. And then, stress because of the pressure in work and jobs such as low paying jobs, job insecurity, and commuting fro their jobs. And lastly, is the stress that comes from peer pressure included job dissatisfaction, status and roles, and pressure of being left out. On the other hand, stress can leads to mental and physical illnesses. Therefore, people can’t suffer too much pressure all the time. As the words of Anne Frank, the survivors of the holocaust, “We all live with the objectives of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.” Anne Frank believes that in how much pressure she got, she wanted to get a good result, which is happiness. Subsequently, she also quoted that even though they lives is different and yet the same she meant that different, race, status, or power, yet everyone is the same.

Work Cited

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Causes of Stress. (n.d.). Stress Management for Health Course. Retrieved April 28, 2012, from http://stresscourse.tripod.com/id14.html

Peer Pressure in the Work Place - Yahoo! Voices - voices.yahoo.com. (n.d.). Yahoo! Voices - voices.yahoo.com. Retrieved April 29, 2012, from http://voices.yahoo.com/peer-pressure-work-place-44917.html

STRESS FACTS | Global Organization for Stress. (n.d.). Global Organization for Stress. Retrieved April 28, 2012, from http://www.gostress.com/stress-facts/

Scott, E. (n.d.). Inspiring Quotes - Inspirational Quotes For Stress Relief. Stress and Stress Management - Causes, Symptoms, Stress Relief Tips and Stress Tests. Retrieved April 29, 2012, from http://stress.about.com/od/understandingstress/a/Inspiring-Quotes-For-Stress-Relief.htm