Environmental stressors: Your environment bombards you with demands too quickly to enable you to adjust to such things as snow storms, traffic, noise, and pollution.

Social stressors: Deadlines, financial problems, job interviews, loss of loved ones, and disagreements all tax your coping skills.

Biological stressors: Changes in our physiology, due to any number of factors—including aging, change in eating habits, poor nutrition, lack of sleep, moving or not moving our bodies, or the onset of adolescence or menopause—require us to adjust to maintain our health.

Mental stressors: Ayurvedic philosophy considers the mind as the place where all disease originates. Whether we practice ayurveda or not, most of us probably recognize that our own thoughts are sometimes our largest source of stress. As our brain takes in information, our past experiences and current stressors from the above categories may cause that new information to turn on our “emergency system” oradrenals, generating a bath of chemicals that create both physiological stress and emotional stress.