Stress management skills

STRESS MANAGEMENT SKILLS

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Basic information about stress

One of the most common questions that psychologists get in their practice is How can I deal with all this stress in my life? Even though the majority of us find ourselves in the question, there are great differences in the personal meaning of the question, i.e. what represents the stress in our life. Therefore, let’s start from the basic information on stress so as to clearly determine the meaning of the term.

Stress is the organism’s response to internal or external events which can endanger us in some way, or they require extra effort to be dealt with. Every demand for the organism’s new adjustment to external or internal (psychological) conditions can be considered as a stressful situation. A stressful situation, i.e. stressor, refers to both the negative and positive incidents.

Winning the lottery, the first kiss or sexual experience, meeting the new potential partner, buying an apartment etc. are some of the life events that can be considered positive stressors. Nevertheless, reactions to such events are hardly ever the reason why people ask a psychologist for help, unless they want a concrete advice or instruction on the constructive decision making, or an easier way for overcoming specific communication problems.

People turn to the psychologist for help because of their reactions to negative stressors, whose intensity can be variable, starting from daily irritable situations (e.g. traffic jam, task overload, working overtime, bad relationships between people) to the cataclysms (floods, fires, war). Somewhere between these two extremes there are all those life events with a special personal meaning for the person who’s experiencing them (e.g. divorce, death of a close person, job loss, and chronic disease). Stress is a reaction to a stressor.

Therefore, it should be observed separately from the stressor itself, i.e. they shouldn’t be equaled even though they are connected (one triggers the other). The early research in stress psychology was focused on the stressors because it was wrongly assumed that the stressful reaction depends on the intensity and/or amount of stress. That is also the attitude of everyday people who don’t deal with psychological problems professionally.

In contrast, psychology rapidly discovered the irregularity in the equation, because it couldn’t explain how come one and the same event is stressful for one person, but not for the other; or, why one person thought of it as a threat, whereas another saw a challenge in it. It’s obvious that those two people experience the same event in the different way, which means the nature of the stressful situation is less significant than the inner psychological experience – interpretation of the stress developing situation (i.e. stressful reaction).

According to that, stress is a consequence of:
1. Assigning certain meaning to a stressful situation
2. Sufficiency estimation of the own capacity for overcoming stress