Sources and Physiological Effects of Environmental Stress:

DUE TO ---------

• Noise
  
• Surrounding Temperature
  
• Traffic
  
• Pollution
  
• Light
  
• Change In Working Environment
  
• Colours
  
• Workload
  
• Condition Of Workplace

Other physiological conditions are:

Hair

I suppose that hair loss is one of the well known effects of stress. Also grey hair is one of the signs of stress, but both of these this could be just a cause of age. A person may also suffer from dandruff or an itch scalp for no apparent reason. Yes both men and women may be affected by this problem.

Ears

A heightened awareness in hearing some sounds may occur. A person may have difficulty hearing other sounds.

The Lungs and breathing

A person may hyperventilate this is an abnormally rapid, deep or shallow breathing pattern. Some symptoms of hyperventilation resemble those of certain heart or lung ailments. Also certain illnesses, such as kidney failure and diabetes, may also trigger hyperventilation. However, the condition is rarely a serious medical problem. During hyperventilation, a person exhales too much carbon dioxide. As the level of carbon dioxide in the blood drops, the blood vessels narrow, allowing less blood to circulate.

If too little blood reaches the brain, the person feels dizzy and may faint. The calcium in the blood also decreases, causing some muscles and nerves to twitch. The twitching may result in a tingling or stabbing sensation near the mouth or in the chest. These symptoms include a tight feeling in the chest, as though the lungs cannot receive enough air. This sensation leads to faster and deeper breathing. The heart may begin to pound, and the pulse rate may rise. Remember that the body will use up energy during this period and they may need to rest a while to recover.

Eyes

A heightened awareness to some sight may occur. A person may have difficulty seeing other sights. The peripheral vision of the person may be affected and they may notice thing outside the normal field of view.

Legs

A person may have similar problems with their legs as they do with their feet. A person with anxiety may find it hard to keep still and their legs may move even while sitting down.

Psycho physiological responses:

--muscles tight or aching, nervous tics like in the eyelid, hands unsteady, restlessness, touching yourself repeatedly, clearing your throat, frequent colds, pain, upset stomach, sweating, skin problem or itch, stiff posture, holding things tightly, strong startle response, headaches, high blood pressure, ulcers, heart disease, colitis, haemorrhoids, rashes, diarrhoea, or frequent urination.

Impact of Brown Haze on Quality Of Life:

v In recent years a thick brown haze has hung over tropical Asia
v Spreads over 10 million square kilometres
v Consists mainly of soot, sulphates, nitrates etc.
v It is decreasing the amount of sunlight over Asia.
v Its mechanism involves complex reactions of greenhouse gases, aerosols and ozone.
This might
v Damages agriculture
v Changes rainfall patterns
v Thousand put in risk of epidemic
Impact on west
v Brown haze has the capacity to travel in a week's time to the western globe
v Australia also runs heavy risk of damage by Brown haze

1. Impact on Society/Social Impacts
1. Impact on economy
v Fishing industry severely affected
v Agriculture affected by flood & drought
v Severe environment causing inefficiency in workers
v Due to various acts and protocol:

2. Geo-political consequences
v Developing countries to be affected the most.
v Imports from non participating countries to increase
v Dependence on technology of the west
v Major economic giants could lose entire standing
v Heavy unemployment will cause public resentment causing political instability & load on resources.

3. Impact on human habitat
v Raise or drop temperature level to unsustainable levels
v Impact on health
§ Increase in epidemics, (malaria, hantavirus, dengue)
§ Lethal heat waves
v Floods & drought causing adverse affects
v Destruction of entire island states.
v Heavier cyclones and hurricanes leading to destruction of life and property.

Social & Psychological Effects of Environment

Due to the following factors

• Loneliness
  
• Family
  
• Friend
  
• Workplace & Work function
  
• Gender
  
• Age
  
• Nationality
  
• Economical Status
  
• Social Status

  Few symptoms of environmental stress in an Individual are:
  

• His body or your emotions will very likely give him warning signs
  
• He is always rushed and cannot take enough time to do things well
  
• He can't slow down and relax, even during vacations.
  
• He is irritable or moody, get angry, or cry for no obvious acute reason.
• He finds it hard to concentrate or to pay attention.
  
• He doesn't follow through on what he would not have forgotten a few months before the deadline for a research paper or sending a birthday card to his best friend.
  
• He cannot seem to find time to do something he enjoyes or to just relax.
  
• His mind is usually racing or talking to itself. He is up to his neck in details and is constantly thinking of more things to do, which makes it hard to focus attention on the problems in front of him. He is not fully "there" when people talk to him.
  
• He has difficulty sleeping even when he is exhausted. Your mind is racing when you should be resting.
  
• He feels pressure and an urgency to be active and accomplish something almost all the time.
  
• He becomes irritated at the minor inconveniences of life, such as standing in line at the cafeteria, waiting for an elevator, or getting caught in traffic. They are very common reactions that result when stress has not been resolved. They indicate that he may be suffering from stress and need to reconsider his attitudes and priorities.
  
  

Coping with some of common environmental stressors

1. Improve Quality Of Lighting: - Try to carry out some of your daily activities in natural light. If you're indoors, try working next to a window and allow as much sunlight as possible to enter your space.

2. Improve Air Quality: - Be sure you have adequate ventilation or air filters in the areas where you spend most time. If you ar concerned about poor air quality, take steps to increase ventilation rates or install air cleaning systems. At home, open the windows frequently to allow air circulation.
3. Reduce Air Pollution: - Ban tobacco smoke. It is a chronic to your health.
4. Remove Physical Obstruction: - Eliminate unnecessary items that only contribute to a feeling of crowdedness or that are in the way. Always keep an area where u can relax or work efficiently.
5. Reduce Noise: - Reduce background noise. Voluntary (TV, radio) and involuntary (co-workers, ringing phones) sources of background noise can be low-level stressors that take their toll over time on our moods and energy
6. Keep Your Immediate Environment Clean: - Be brutally honest about what's essential, and remove all papers, magazines, piles of junk, and other unneeded objects that have taken up permanent residence in your space.
Many times we cannot change our environment and we are not left with any choice than to yield to the pressures of stress. In the following section we discuss the ways in which stress can be relieved.

Can you relieve stress?

• Information.
  
• Accept the feelings/symptoms
  
• Express your feelings
  
• Join a support group
  
• Use recreational/leisure outlets
  
• Set realistic goals
  
• Listen to your body
  
• Learn relaxation techniques
  

Information: - In order to find an answer to relieving your stress, it's helpful to know what the problem is - what causes your stress and how you feel under stress. It is important to get to the root of your stress reactions and modify/adapt them. Identify the situations in your life that make you feel tense.

Accept the Feelings/Symptoms: - Learn to handle the situation by altering your perceptions. Stress may not be inherent in the event but rather in how you view the event or situation. May be it is not as bad a situation as you think!

Express Your Feelings: - You need someone to listen to your frustrations - may be a friend or relative or an objective person such as a counsellor or minister.

Join a Support Group: - You may need to be with others to hear how they cope with the stress of their illness as well as expressing your own feelings to a group of people in the same situation.

Use Recreational/Leisure Outlets: - Go bowling, play golf, go swimming, play cards. Remember this is an escape. Don't forget to tackle the problem once you are capable!

Set Realistic Goals: - Develop Positive Attitudes and Lifestyles: - It is important to learn how to think positively and recognize when to seek support from others. Stress is an emotional and physical reaction, and developing a healthier than average attitude and lifestyle can help you be a better than average stress manager. A healthy lifestyle - not smoking, exercising, eating well and getting enough rest and relaxation - can make you fell better about yourself and reduce the chances of stress-related symptoms and S>O>B>

Listen to Your Body: - It will let you know when you are pushing too hard - symptoms are not to be feared. They may be giving you feedback that your stressors are not being managed effectively.

Learn Relaxation Techniques: - Being told "you need to relax" does not help when you are feeling short of breath and are afraid you will not be able to catch your next breath. Learning how to relax can be done. Relaxation is a form of control that allows you to gain control over stress and your body's response to it. Relaxation takes time.

Conclusion:

Through this brief discussion about environmental stress we have tried to bring out the various aspects associated with the phenomenon.

Crowding As an Environmental Issue:

In recent years we have grown increasingly aware of a uniquely serious environmental problem. Although the concomitant patterns of industrialization and urbanized that have led to a concentration of human population in urban centres are not new sensitivity to the social and psychological implication of these events is a recent phenomenon.

What is Crowding?: - When we think about crowding the first image comes to our mind is that the crowding is something related to overcrowded place like a large number of people packed together like sardines in a limited amount of space. Yet with a little more reflection it will become apparent that the meaning of the crowding is more complex than it seems.

Environmental psychologists too have discovered that the meaning of crowding, which at first seems straight forwards, is actually quite complex.

Crowding vs. Density: - Danial stokes has proposed that researchers adopt a psychological definition of crowding. He notes that researchers have often defined crowding exclusively in terms of spatial restriction-that is, density-ignoring the personal experiences that may mediate between the spatial aspects of crowding and the resultant effects on human behaviour.

He proposes that the term density is restricted to the strictly physical or spatial aspects of a setting, while the term crowding should be used to refer to the psychological or subjective factor in a situation.
1. Density (spatial constrains) is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for crowding.
2. Density is the direct perception of available space, while crowding is a subjective evaluation that the perceived amount of space is inadequate.
3. According to Jonathen freedman, crowding should not be restricted to subjective perception but rather should refer to simply to the amount of objective space available per person.

Social Crowding: - Number of people in a given area.

Spatial Crowding: - Available space in a particular setting. With this distinction in mind researcher involved in studying the effects of social crowding. Investigation have varied the size of the social group in a spatial setting of constant size. Example: A group of five person might be compared with a group of the person in moderate sized room.

Spatial Density: - It has been investigated by studying a social group of constant size in spatial setting of various sizes. For example a group of seven might be compared in a small and in a large room.

Inside Crowding vs. Outside Crowding: - This distinction becomes apparent when we consider the difference between high social crowding in animal and human population. For human population, the definition is more complex because that often occur with high density.

Stress: - According to Hang selye, stress involver a complex series of bodily reaction, termed the general adaptation syndrome, or GAS.

The stress model is used to explain the behavioural effects of nose and extreme temperatures.It can also help us to understand the psychological processes through which crowding affects human behaviour. For Example: - Many environmental psychologists believe that the relation between crowding and outcome behaviour, such as negative forms of social activities is mediated by a psychological stress reaction. Some investigators have suggested that crowding stress is mediated by height and arousal resulting from the invasion of personal space that involves increased adrenaline secretion, heart rate, blood pressure and skin conductance.

Psychological stress in human involves an important cognitive compotent; the individual appraises the personal meaning or significance of the stress
By Loo's social - spatial model we find that people have both social and spatial needs. Social needs concern the number of people that an individual desires to be with an the amount of personal needs, spatial needs concern amount of physical space and the type of boundaries. Thus according to Loo's model, psychological stress can be induced by setting that are under crowded as well as by those that are over crowded.

Theoretical Perspectives on Crowding

It generally means that what are your ways of thinking about a crowding setting in order to experience it or when you are influenced by it.

Some Theoretical Perspectives on Crowding: -
- Crowding and Information overload
- Crowding and Behavioural Constraint
- Crowding and Personal Control
- Ecological Models of Crowding


Crowding and Information Overload

Environmental Psychologists have proposed that the theory of 'Information Overload' can be applied to understand the fact that how people try to cope with a crowding. Example: - In a crowding setting how to deal with the excess information which impinges on them from all around.

Crowding as Information Overload

• Advanced model of crowding based on the notion of information overload:
  - J.A. Desor views crowding as excess information from social factors.
  - Aristide Esser suggests that crowding results from unfamiliar social sources.
  

- Amos Rappaport envisions crowding in terms of information processing, proposing that crowding is caused by high social or sensory stimulation.

These models can be applied to explain the psychological consequences of social and spatial density. Example: - Susan Saegert and her associates suggest that as the number of people in a setting (social density) increase, the cognitive complexity is increased by the added social information each new come represents; but when available space decreases remaining the number of people same, cognitive complexity will not increase.

Crowding and Behavioural Constraint
Some environmental psychologists have proposed that the negative consequences of crowding are caused by the limitations that high spatial and social density imposes on people's behavioural freedom. According to the view, the amount of distress you would experience would depend on the degree of choice you feel better, but if you have not any alternative, then your psychological distress might be considerable. This Psychological process can be understood by theory of behavioural constraint which explain how crowding affects people's mood as well as their performance tasks.

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