And More About Stress

I don't know where this is from originally, but it makes sense to me.

When you think about stress management, there are five areas you can target. Think of SCOPE:

Support
Control
Objectives
Perspectives
Esteem

1. Support: Get some support for yourself. Talk about it. Be careful though--support is not gossiping, and it is not bad mouthing. It is productive, and the point is for you to lower your stress level.

2. Control: How much control do you have? How important it is to you? If you have no control, don't spend your time trying to control it. Look elsewhere, and let that piece go. You can't control someone else's behaviour, unless you are in a position of power, for example. But maybe you can enlist the aid of someone who does have some control or influence.

3. Objectives: What do you want to accomplish? Do you want to win? Or do you want to have a good atmosphere at home/office/school? Do you want to resolve something?

4. Perspective: Find a new way to think about what is going on. How is the other person looking at the same issue? How does your colleague experience it? Can you think of the stressful situation as one that is challenging? Can you change the meaning--arguing with your husband means that the two of you are communicating or that the two of you are comfortable enough to differ in opinion.

5. Esteem: Sometimes a stressor is difficult because it calls into question something about ourselves. We feel, or wonder, maybe I am not good enough, I am not smart enough, I am not good looking enough. If you can change those thoughts, or argue them as they arise, then the stressor will have less impact on you. A first date doesn't go well? That doesn't mean there is a problem with you.

Stress and Stress Management

People often talk about being stressed, and about managing stress. I think it helps to take a closer look at what stress is.

Stress is, in some ways, a psychological/physiological response to a stimuli. The stimuli can be externally or internally generated. For instance, it could be a colleague at work, or it could be worry about an exam.

The important thing to focus on is that stress is a response to something. It manifests as worry, fear, anxiety, anger, depression, and so on. There are stressors, and there are stress responses. This give you a couple options. One, you can manage your response or you can manage the stimulus.

Managing the stimulus might mean talking directly with your colleague, or studying for an exam, speaking to the professor of the course, or avoidance. Managing the stimulus might also entail managing what it means to you and why.

Managing your response would entail doing something so that you are not worrying, afraid, etc., or those feelings are lowered to a level which you consider tolerable.

There are a number of techniques to do the latter. These include creative visualization, meditation, yoga, journaling, finding support and talking to friends, going to the gym, hot baths, etc. You need to find out what works for you.

Often, or course, we use a combination of both dealing with the stimulus, and dealing with our response.

To start, take a piece of paper and divide it into two columns. Label one stimulus, and the other my response. Below that, rate the level of both, 1 being low 10 being high. Below that, write out an exact description of each. Then write down the techniques you are going to use to deal with each.

Keep a journal with two columns. Each day, or half day, or whenever it is convenient, and you have focused on working on one or both, write down what you have done and how effective it is. Then rate the level of strength of the stimulus and/or response on you after doing so. After a while, you will find there is a decrease in the one (or both) that was high.

A therapist can help you learn and use techniques to manage your stress responses and to understand what you are doing that is creating and maintaining them. He can also help you understand what it is about the stressor which is leading you to have a stress response. When you change your perceptions about the stressor, you may not have the stress response, or it will not be as strong.

Stress and Stress Management I

How we visualize what is going on in our world can affect how we deal with the stress that we have, or whether or not we have stress. If we don't think of something as stressful, it isn't. That is one reason why different people experience the same issue differently.

One of my clients was having tremendous difficulty coping with all of the things that she needed to get done. She thought about them as too many balls in the air that she had to keep juggling.

She decided to imagine putting the balls in the air on the ground. She just let them drop, and imagined her looking at them one by one, and thinking about which ones she was going to deal with and when. Some of them she imagined putting in the garbage.

Her stress level dropped enormously.