Stress Management
What is Stress?
Stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual can mobilize. People feel little stress when they have the time, experience, and resources to manage a situation. They feel great stress when they think they can’t handle the demands put upon them.
Stress is the “wear and tear” our bodies experience as we adjust to our continually changing environment. It has physical and emotional effects on us and can create positive or negative feelings. As a positive influence, stress can help compel us to action; it can cause a new awareness and an exciting new perspective. As a negative influence, it can cause feelings of distrust, rejection, anger, and depression, which can lead to health problems such as headaches, upset stomach, rashes, insomnia, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. With the death of a loved one, the birth of a child, a job promotion, or a new relationship, we experience stress as we readjust our lives. In so adjusting to different circumstances, stress will help or hinder us depending on how we react to it.
How to Manage Stress?
As we have seen, positive stress adds anticipation and excitement to life, and we all thrive under a certain amount of stress. Deadlines, competitions, confrontations, and even our frustrations and sorrows add depth and enrichment to our lives. Our goal is not to eliminate stress but to learn how to manage it and how to use it to help us. Insufficient stress acts as a depressant and may leave us feeling bored or dejected; excessive stress may leave us feeling “tied up in knots”. What we need to do is find the optimal level of stress that will individually motivate but not overwhelm each of us.
There is no single level of stress that is optimal for all people. We are all individual creatures with unique requirements. What is distressing to one may be a joy to another? And even when we agree that a particular event is distressing, we are likely to differ in our physiological and psychological responses to it.
The person who loves to arbitrate disputes and move from job site to job site would be stressed in a job that was stable and routine, whereas the person who thrives under stable conditions would very likely be stressed in a job where duties were highly varied. Also, our personal stress requirements and the amount which we can tolerate before we become distressed changes with our lifestyles and our ages.
It has been found that most illness is related to unrelieved stress. If you are experiencing stress symptoms, you have gone beyond your optimal stress level; you need to reduce the stress in your life and/or improve your ability to manage it.
Finding the cause of the anxiety is the first step in resolving a problem with stress. Stress management refers to the effort to control and reduce the tension that occurs with a situation that is considered difficult or unmanageable. Identifying unrelieved stress and being aware of its effect on our lives is not sufficient for reducing its harmful effects. Just as there are many sources of stress, there are many possibilities for its management. However, all require effort toward change: changing the source of stress and/or changing your reaction to it.
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