How to manage stress at the workplace: neuroscientific applications

Historically, stress has been defined as an aspecific response of the organism to any form of exogenous or endogenous stimulus that, due to its duration or intensity, is capable of triggering adaptation mechanisms to face the stimulus and restore homeostasis (Selye, 1975).Despite this definition could be criticized as too simplistic, since it leaves out the contextual factors and appraisal mechanisms (Matthews et al., 2017), it contains the assumption that stress can be considered a basic adaptation reaction to a positive or negative event.Stress responses are essential for triggering the organism and for addressing an event or situation appropriately.In this way, stress encourages a controlled reaction in which the individual feels to have sufficient skills and resources to respond to the context's demands and initiates a productive problem-solving process.On the other hand, when the action of the stressor agent is too severe and lasts for long, such processes of physiological adaptation begin to fail, homeostatic regulatory mechanisms become less efficient, and the stress response becomes dysfunctional (Dhabhar, 2014).Therefore, extremely low, and extremely high stress levels are linked to a drop in cognitive performance and the lack of adaptive responses, while optimal levels of performance are settled in the middle of the stress curve.Intense and chronic exposure to severe stressors may have relevant clinical implications, however, the same sequence of physiological and psychological events occurs