ii. What is Stress

Stress is defined as the emotional and physiological responses to demanding situations. The competitive, progressive fast life style poses too many demands on the emotional and the physiological coping mechanisms. Repeated long standing demands on these physiological responses lead to a wrong habit resulting in hyper-sensitization of the frequently used channels of response. One of the major responses of this stress adaptation mechanism is increased muscle spasm. For example when you meet a friend and comment “ Ai, why are you looking so much stressed and tensed today?”, how did you make out that he is stressed by just looking at his appearance? Is it not that you saw your friend fretting and fuming with a frown on the face and stiffness all over his body? This is due to excessive contraction of the facial muscles and the postural muscles of the spine. Increased muscle spasm is the nature's protective response to the demanding situation along with many other changes such as increased heart and breathing rate etc. that help us to cope up with demanding situations. This will not be a problem if the period