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Posts Tagged ‘stressful event’

We all have this favorite expression when it comes to being stressed out, and I wouldn’t bother naming all of them since it may also vary in different languages. But when it comes down to it, I think that it is how we work or even relax, for that matter that triggers stress. Ever been stressed even when you’re well relaxed and bored? I know I have.

Since stress is unavoidable in life, it is important to find ways to decrease and prevent stressful incidents and decrease negative reactions to stress. Here are some of the things that can be done by just remembering it, since life is basically a routine to follow like brushing your teeth or eating breakfast. You can do a few of them in a longer span of time, but as they say - every minute counts.

Managing time

Time management skills can allow you more time with your family and friends and possibly increase your performance and productivity. This will help reduce your stress.

To improve your time management:

• Save time by focusing and concentrating, delegating, and scheduling time for yourself.
• Keep a record of how you spend your time, including work, family, and leisure time.
• Prioritize your time by rating tasks by importance and urgency. Redirect your time to those activities that are important and meaningful to you.
• Manage your commitments by not over- or undercommitting. Don’t commit to what is not important to you.
• Deal with procrastination by using a day planner, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines.
• Examine your beliefs to reduce conflict between what you believe and what your life is like.

Build healthy coping strategies

It is important that you identify your coping strategies. One way to do this is by recording the stressful event, your reaction, and how you cope in a stress journal. With this information, you can work to change unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones-those that help you focus on the positive and what you can change or control in your life.

Lifestyle


Some behaviors and lifestyle choices affect your stress level. They may not cause stress directly, but they can interfere with the ways your body seeks relief from stress. Try to:

• Balance personal, work, and family needs and obligations.
• Have a sense of purpose in life.
• Get enough sleep, since your body recovers from the stresses of the day while you are sleeping.
• Eat a balanced diet for a nutritional defense against stress.
• Get moderate exercise throughout the week.
• Limit your consumption of alcohol.
• Don’t smoke.

Social support


Social support is a major factor in how we experience stress. Social support is the positive support you receive from family, friends, and the community. It is the knowledge that you are cared for, loved, esteemed, and valued. More and more research indicates a strong relationship between social support and better mental and physical health.

Changing thinking


When an event triggers negative thoughts, you may experience fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. These emotions trigger the body’s stress, just as an actual threat does. Dealing with your negative thoughts and how you see things can help reduce stress.

• Thought-stopping helps you stop a negative thought to help eliminate stress.
• Disproving irrational thoughts helps you to avoid exaggerating the negative thought, anticipating the worst, and interpreting an event incorrectly.
• Problem solving helps you identify all aspects of a stressful event and find ways to deal with it.
• Changing your communication style helps you communicate in a way that makes your views known without making others feel put down, hostile, or intimidated. This reduces the stress that comes from poor communication. Use the assertiveness ladder to improve your communication style.

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Personal events are closely related to family since our lives are not lived in isolation, but in relation to other people, often family members. But personal stress-full events would be events such as going to prison, which is also ranked high on the Holmes and Rahe scale, or moving house, or taking up a new hobby, or stopping smoking, or trying to control your anger and so forth.

Quite a lot of personal events that one would think should not cause stress CAN be stressful, due once again to the nature of the change that one has to go through. An example of this is “Outstanding personal achievement”. One always think that an outstanding personal achievement would be a wonderful thing, but associated with this event would be changes such as coping with the empty feeling of not having a goal to strive towards any more and coping with ‘15 minutes of fame’ if it is such a type of achievement.

Other stress-full circumstances would be health related - especially if suffering from a serious injury or illness. Why illness can be such a stressful event is apart from the physical aspects of the illness, is that there is a huge psychological component to ill-health. This stress aspect can apply equally to the family of the person who is sick, as to the sick person himself.

The fact of the matter is that during the past 50 to 60 years there has been a tremendous change in the structure of society and family life - previously there used to be a much tighter cohesion in family structures, the old looked after the young and vice versa when it became necessary, women didn’t work so much out of the home so there were always a spare person available to look after the sick and the elderly. These days, families are torn apart by divorce, moving away to foreign countries and women have full-day jobs and in some cases, everyone in the family holds down more than one job at the same time, leaving little time and energy to care for someone who is sick. This means that if there is ill-health in the family, the people who need to take on the burden of care is often subjected to a great deal of stress in having to do so.

Apart from that, being sick these days inevitably carries the fear of losing your job or becoming so disabled that you cannot care for your family. Admittedly, this has been a problem since time began - if you were sick then you couldn’t hunt for food and your family probably starved to death.

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Obviously the death of a partner is absolutely the highest level of stress that one can experience. There are other events that might seem to be events that should NOT be stressful, but since these circumstances signify a major change in your life they ARE stressful. You need to let go of the old way of doing things and make a change to the new. You need to re-draw the map of your world and re-learn the territory. Examples of these types of stressful circumstances are getting married, moving house, or being reconciled with a partner.

It is noticeable how many sources of stress stem from family related events - it is maybe not that surprising since most aspects of our lives revolve around family, friends and relationships. Examples are marital relationships, sexual difficulties, pregnancy and giving birth, relationships with the in-laws, the neighbors and other family members.

Divorce is endemic to our society these days and according to the Holmes and Rahe scale, it is actually the second most stressful event that you can experience, apart from the death of the partner. Yet it is almost expected these days to shrug off the emotional pain associated with this event and continue with life as if nothing major has happened. Just the fact that divorce is not seen as being such an unusual event any more makes it even more stressful to handle. As opposed to getting almost the same level of support and sympathy from family and friends that one would expect with the death of a loved one, when one gets divorced these days the same level of support is not always forthcoming.

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