Dr. Naomi Humber, Head of Mental Wellbeing, Bupa Health Clinics
Short Biography...
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What is stress?
Stress is a natural response to a pressure, a demand that we are facing, and it prompts us to address the challenges or the threats in a certain way to be able to cope with those situations. We find that we can get stressed in certain situations, for example, when we are having to face something that we've never done before and this prompts the body to react in a certain way, to be able to allow us to cope with that effectively. The body releases hormones such as adrenaline into the body, and that is known as the fight or flight response. Certain amounts of stress can be really positive, really beneficial for us, and they can allow us to effectively tackle the things that we're having to do. However, if we have stress over an extended period of time, and it's excessive for us, that can have negative health impacts on us.
What are the symptoms of stress?
There are a range of symptoms that are commonly associated with stress, and everyone is a little bit different. We can have symptoms such as low mood, irritability, feeling worried all the time. We can have trouble concentrating and attending to things. We can have physical health implications, for example. We can struggle to sleep. We can have problems with our eating. For example, we are overeating or we don't have an appetite. It might be that we're not motivated at all to do the things we're asked to do, and sometimes we do see that we've got existing physical health conditions and they can flare up, for example, skin conditions.
What is depression?
Everyone in life will experience low mood, and that is a common feeling that we can have as we go through day-to-day life. However, clinical depression commonly is all about having a persistent low mood where we have certain other symptoms that are impacting on our daily functioning. For example, feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, low self-worth and low self-esteem. There can be things to do with our negative thinking around things, how we view ourselves, the world, others, there's lots of different negative thinking going on. It can be about how we can struggle with sleep, so we can either be sleeping too much or not being able to get to sleep. There can be problems with eating, so we are struggling to have an appetite or we are eating a lot excessively, almost comfort eating. We can also find that people can have suicidal thoughts, thoughts of not wanting to be here. They can have self-harm thoughts as well. So there's lots of different things that people can experience and people can go from the mild with those symptoms right through to the severe, and it can impair them in so many different ways. It's a very difficult situation to be facing for people. One thing I would mention is that people can present very differently with depression, so they can lean into certain types of symptoms and one person with depression isn't going to experience it in exactly the same way as another person.