Stress Management
Stress is unavoidable but ways to cope with it are available.
One of the first steps toward good stress management is understanding how you react to stress -- and making changes if necessary. Take an honest look at how you react to stress and then adopt or modify stress management techniques to make sure the stress in your life doesn't lead to health problems.
Of course, their effectiveness depends on the type of stressor, the particular individual, and the circumstances.
For example, if you think about the way your friends deal with stressors like exams, you will see a range of different coping responses. Some people will pace around or tell you how worried they are, others will pester their teachers for clues.
Coping Responses
There are two types of coping responses: problem-focused and emotion-focused.
Problem-focused coping targets the causes of stress in practical ways which tackles the problem or stressful situation that is causing stress, consequently directly reducing the stress.
Problem-focused strategies include:
- Take control
- Seek information (research)
- Evaluate the pros and cons
Problem focused strategies do not work in all situations. For example, if you have experienced the death of a loved one, dealing with feelings of grief will require emotion focused coping.
Emotion-focused coping involves trying to reduce the negative emotional responses associated with stress such as embarrassment, fear, anxiety, depression and frustration.
This may be the only realistic option when the source of stress is outside the person's control.
Drug therapy can be seen as emotion focused coping as it focuses on the arousal caused by stress and not the problem.
Emotion focused strategies include:
- Meditation or prayer
- Journaling
- Positive thinking
- Keeping busy
Negative coping or defensive coping is usually using socially unacceptable behaviors.
Substance abuse is one of the unfortunate ways that people try to deal with or avoid stress in a negative way. Unfortunately this only adds to the problems and does not reduce the stress.
Another negative coping mechanism is aggression. People under stress have heightened anger and hostility and they may take out this aggression on others in an abusive way.
A third negative coping mechanism is withdrawl from friends and family. This withdrawl can reach its ultimate when the person considers or actually attempts suicide.
Sigmund Freud gave us the defense mechanisms (you learned about these earlier) that are behaviors that help cope with stress.
They are negative if they continue and we don't face the stressors in our lives. They are positive if they are used to give us a short break from stress to regroup, deal with and eliminate the stress.
Read "Positive Coping Strategies" to learn how to turn stressors into positive coping strategies.
Psychological Wellness
In this lesson we have looked at positive coping strategies to help us deal with stress. They include, focusing on the positive, meditation or prayer, journaling, and keeping busy. Those are also ways to promote psychological wellness.
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