In many countries, heart disease kills a lot of women and even more men. There are four major causes of this disease and these are smoking, poor or bad diet, a family history of heart disease and stressful work. Among these main wrong-doers, the most common cause is stress. What is stress and how do you feel when you are under stress? Imagine you live alone - you are lying in bed at night and, suddenly, you hear someone in the kitchen. Immediately your heart begins to beat very fast and you feel that you can hardly breathe. What you are feeling is not stress, but fear. However, your body changes in the same way when you feel stress. That means that if you feel anxious and worried during an important examination, your heart may beat very fast and you may feel breathless too. You are experiencing stress. Another common situation in which a person is likely to feel stress is to have to do something, for example, performing a boring duty, every day. Let us look at the case of Annie who was a nurse. She felt a lot of stress in her work and began to have very bad headaches at the end of the day. Each morning she woke up more tired than she was when she went to sleep. She did not want to go out in the evening with her friends and she felt unhappy all the time. Finally, she sat down and thought about her life. She saw a lot of illness and death in her work but that was not the reason why she was under stress. The real reason was that she felt unable to make a positive decision in her job - she had to do what the doctors and sisters told her. So, Annie went back to college for further study. When she graduated, she found a job where she was part of a team as before, but where she had responsibility in making decisions. Her working hours were longer and her work more difficult than when she was a nurse but she enjoyed it. She felt she was in control of her life and her work. For Annie, stress in her old job had made her change her life and end a difficult situation. Stress in her new job became a good thing because it helped her achieve satisfaction in her life and in her work. Feeling   _   is one form of stress.
tired alone anxious breathless