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Relationship Between Stress and Well-Being
Stress has been defined as a physiological and psychological response to real or imagined change in the environment. According to Folkman and Lazarus, psychological stress typically occurs when individuals perceive environmental demands as exceeding their physical and psychological capabilities. The experience of stress has been consistently linked with decreased physical and psychological well-being, for example, cardiovascular disease, diminished life satisfaction, and emotional symptoms. The various ways individuals react to stress can be viewed from two perspectives. Between-person stress is an individual’s tendency to be more or less stressed than someone else. On the other hand, within-person stress focuses on how stressed a person is from one situation to another. For example, walking outdoors usually represents a low stress scenario while writing an exam the next day would be considered more strenuous. The existing literature on this topic has looked mainly at how changes in between-person stress can affect well-being. Therefore, future research should focus on the effect of within-person stress on well-being. This is essential because researchers have demonstrated that on days where individuals are more stressed, they experience more negative emotions, distress, and anxiety. Given that stress can negatively impact well-being, it becomes important to identify factors that can protect us from its psychological effects. Two potential protective factors may be self-esteem and self-compassion. Self-esteem is a person’s overall sense of value or self-worth and is frequently based on social comparison to others. Self-compassion means to be kind and understanding towards ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, instead of being overly self-critical or ignoring our pain. Practicing self-compassion means to accept that people have imperfections and to allow ourselves to experience emotions. It seems that having self-esteem and self-compassion is important in order for one to achieve higher well-being.