Thanks Greg! The three stages are what Selye referred to as the General
Adaptation Syndrome. To recap, General Adaptation Syndrome consists of three
stages. First is the alarm stage. This is when your body first reacts to the
stressful or threatening situation. With activation of the sympathetic nervous
system and the HPA Axis. The second stage is the resistance stage. This is when
your body tries to adapt to the stress. Here, we have sustained release of
cortisol, as our body attempts to maintain our level of arousal to combat the
threat or the stressful situation. And finally we have the exhaustion stage.
This is when our body resources have been depleted in an attempt to deal with
the threat or stressful situation. As a result of this depletion, our immune
system is weakened, making it more likely that we experience illness and
infection. It's important to note however that this model doesn't account for
all stress responses. In fact, new research has shown that different emotions
can actually produce different activation patterns in a autonomic nervous
system. Which call for some question of the validity of the general adoption
syndrome never the less this model does serve as an overview of how are bodies
might react with stressful event.
