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Understanding and Managing Stress

Date: January 24, 2010
Author: Penny Pettman
Categories: Advice
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Stress is destructive to health and relationships. Stress is experienced when a person feels demands and expectations that exceed perceived available resources. Resources may relate to time, money, skill, tools, etc. The perception of the imbalance between the demands and resources and potential future adverse consequences for failing to meet the demand or expectation does not have to be correct in order for the situation to cause stress. That is, false understandings or beliefs can cause significant stress. Therefore any event or thought that causes a person to perceive a threatening demand is a potential source of stress.
It is true that on this planet there are situations that need to be reacted to and in the absence of stress, our species would never have survived. Accordingly, a positive aspect of stress is that it alerts you to a threat and provides you with increased levels of energy and motivation to help in coping with the threat. However mishandled stress or too much stress causes strain and can be devastating for you.
The negative effects of stress are numerous and perhaps we don’t even know them all. However, they include fatigue, irritability, anger, difficulty concentrating, a lower immune system, a variety of serious physical health problems, insomnia, depression, anxiety, loss of personal relationships, over eating and drug and alcohol abuse.
There is no one way to deal with stress. Stress may be reduced, eliminated or managed by addressing one or more of the underlying components of stress. For example you might reduce demands by planning ahead, increasing available resources, just saying “no”, finding ways to increase efficiency. Or, you might reduce the stress emotions by taking a break from the stressful situation, relaxing, exercising, getting a massage, taking a vacation. Or, you might eliminate or mitigate the impact of the consequences of failing to meet the demand by preparing for the consequences (e.g. having a savings account or buying insurance), changing your priorities (so what if the car doesn’t get washed?), accepting what can’t be changed, putting energy towards improving the situation.
You need to have the correct perspective concerning the demands you face. You need to be aware of your capabilities, resources, and the real consequences of failing to meet a demand. You need to see things accurately without distortions. Believing something is terrible when it is only just unpleasant can cause unnecessary stress.
There is scientific evidence that suggests that the experience of stress in the past magnifies how you react to stress in the future because stress actually alters your body and your brain. You can become sensitive to stress and then even the smallest stressor can invoke reactions in your brain and body that cause your brain to treat a small incident as a life threatening event. Because some stress is requisite for humans, your body is designed to provide an appropriate reaction to stress depending on the degree of the threat. However, when you become sensitive to stress due to earlier stress experiences, your body’s response that is designed for life threatening events is activated by ordinary trials and tribulations of life such that you respond inappropriately (in other words, overreact). This sensitivity to stress may begin during childhood. It is likely that the impact is greater when it is initiated during childhood.
It is of extreme importance that you become aware of your body so that you can sense when it is getting stressed and either reduce the stressors (i.e. demands perceived to exceed resources and perceived negative consequences) or take time for meditation, yoga, exercise, gardening, reading, writing, listening to music, going for a walk. Also, the knowledge about being sensitive to stress due to past stress experiences (i.e. the life-death reaction to inconsequential matters) is helpful, if it applies to you, because you can use logic and rational thoughts to understand why you’re reacting as you are and to correct this behaviour if you feel yourself overreacting to stressors.
You are vulnerable to stress and will experience stress; but you do not have to be its victim. You have the ability to control stress and what you permit it to do to you. http://www.yourowndevices.ca

5 Stress Management Tips for Effective Communication

Date: December 12, 2009
Author: Penny Pettman
Categories: Advice
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Not enough time, boss pushing for work to be completed, children are loud, bills to pay, shopping to be done, housework to do, partner asking for your help… and to top it all off you’re suppose to be nice to people by communicating effectively with them? Yikes!If you’re like me, you find it hard to communicate in stressful moments. Stress management techniques don’t always do the trick. In response to stress, you either become aggressive towards other people to release stress or you become submissive to hide the stress.Showing aggression towards another person temporarily feels okay, but then reality kicks in as you feel even more stressed from having hurt the other person. When you are submissive and hide your stress, it internally eats at you as your emotions get suppressed, which then hurts your relationships.When under stress, your communication style will change in response to the situation. You can go from a cool and collected person one moment, yet when a stressful situation impinges your tolerable threshold your calm style likely shifts to the aggressive or submissive behaviors.What behavior you fall back on in stressful situations is the one you have been comfortable with in the past that will have “protected” you. It’s a natural human extinct built within us that we use to block out external factors and listen to internal ones. You probably now are able to realize that stress causes you to block external factors, such as other people’s feelings, as your interpersonal communication skills decline. You begin to only worry for your internal factors.When someone has surpassed their tolerable stress level, telling them to get their “act together” or how ineffective their current communication is, does not work. It won’t work for you either. Communicating better in intense conflict is a matter of managing stress otherwise it is next to impossible to deal with conflict.Stress motivates us to take action, but it too often works against us. I’ve come up with the best five ways and techniques to manage stress that you can use to deal with difficult conflict:1) Stop the stress from rising in the first place. The best technique to deal with stress is to stop it from occurring altogether. You can incorporate other stress management techniques listed below into your stress plan before you get stressed in conflict.2) Breathe. When your stressed levels rise, you breathe shallowly. This causes you to enter the fight or flight response that hurts your ability to effectively communicate. When your stress levels rise, take several deep, slow breathes and you will instantly reduce your stress levels.3) Accept responsibility for how you feel. It is tempting and too easy to release your stress on other people. Do not treat people inappropriately. If you treat people in a way they don’t want to be treated, you build their stress levels, which they will be happy to put back on you.When you accept responsibility, you live in truth. you eliminate blame. You do not become a victim of others. You take control of your feelings. Your new levels of responsibility builds your self-control and ability to manage stress.If someone causes you stress, you need to address the person by explaining to them how you feel, why you feel that way, and what can be done to fix the problem. Do not stress out the person by focusing your reason for being stressed directly on the person, but focus on the problem. Be problem oriented and not person oriented.4) Take time out. Walking away is a guaranteed stress management technique to refresh your mind. If you can afford to go on a Caribbean cruise, go for it! For others who cannot do that, go for a walk or workout at the gym. Being active releases hormones that counter stress. Being away from the stress also takes your mind off the problem and gives you clearer thoughts and feelings. Be sure to address the problem after your time out, however, otherwise you will only have temporarily avoided the real issue.5) Be flexible. Stress is like the sunrise and sunset. It is inevitable. Therefore, the best way to deal with it is to change your behavior and communication. You need to be able to recognize when others are stressed by reading their verbal and nonverbal language then adjust yourself accordingly. Be flexible by going a bit out of your way for them to assist their temporary needs and wants. Don’t run around the world for them, but do be more aware and respondent of them. This can lead you to less stress.Bonus Tip: Ask others about your responses in stressful moments. It is useful to ask others what you do when you enter that threshold level where you begin to block out external factors. Just ask them what you are like and how it makes them feel when you are stressed. You are to ask other people about this because assessing yourself when you experience heavy emotions is an inaccurate source of information.Stress shouldn’t make you miserable. We were given the ability to be stressed to get things done otherwise we would sit on our lazy behinds all day. Learn these ways to manage your stress to effectively communicate, and you will better manage your relationship communication in stressful moments.