Stress Management (updated)

Introduction To Stress Management

Before practicing any stress management it is very important for you to know that basically what stress is?



Defination

Stress is viewed as a "bad thing", with a range of harmful biochemical and long-term effects.

The most commonly accepted definition of stress is that stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that “demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.” In short, it's what we feel when we think we've lost control of events.

Another theory which may help you understand stress is 'Fight or Flight' response.

Fight or Flight

After many researches on stress, the existance of the theory fight or flight was established.This theory defines that when a person recieves a shock or a threat , a particular organisms releases such hormones that makes up the person for facing that condition. These hormones for example helps us to run faster at a situation when running can save us from that situation or they makes us fight harder when fight occurs.

These hormones increases our heart rate and blood pressure, delivering more oxygen and blood sugar, so that to power up the particular muscles. Sweating occurs to cool those muscles and help them to stay efficient. Even these hormones makes us more attentive and focused to the situation leaving everything else behind. All of this significantly improves our ability to survive life-threatening events.

Not only life threatening situations trigger this reaction but all of the involuntary actions that seems to be unexpected or occurs without our conciousness can trigger this reaction. If the threat is small our reaction is also calm but if something happens which according to us should not happen makes us react vigorously.

There are very few situations in modern working life where this response is useful. Most situations benefit from a calm, rational, controlled and socially sensitive approach.

In the short term, we need to keep this fight-or-flight response under control to be effective in our jobs. In the long term we need to keep it under control to avoid problems of poor health and severe angerness.



Stress Management

Stress management is the concept for reducing stress and anxiety. This includes a practical help that makes us overcome destructive emotions such as anger and fear or demand for things away from our reach.



Models of stress management

The Transactional Model

Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman suggested in 1984 that stress can be thought of as resulting from an “imbalance between demands and resources” or as occurring when “pressure exceeds one's perceived ability to cope”. Stress management was developed and premised on the idea that stress is not a direct response to a stressor but rather one's resources and ability to cope mediate the stress response and are amenable to change, thus allowing stress to be controllable.

In order to develop an effective stress management programme it is first necessary to identify the factors that are central to a person controlling his/her stress, and to identify the intervention methods which effectively target these factors. Lazarus and Folkman's interpretation of stress focuses on the transaction between people and their external environment (known as the Transactional Model). The model conceptualizes stress as a result of how a stressor is appraised and how a person appraises his/her resources to cope with the stressor. The model breaks the stressor-stress link by proposing that if stressors are perceived as positive or challenging rather than a threat, and if the stressed person is confident that he/she possesses adequate rather than deficient coping strategies, stress may not necessarily follow the presence of a potential stressor. The model proposes that stress can be reduced by helping stressed people change their perceptions of stressors, providing them with strategies to help them cope and improving their confidence in their ability to do so.


Health realization/innate health model

The health realization/innate health model of stress is also founded on the idea that stress does not necessarily follow the presence of a potential stressor. Instead of focusing on the individual's appraisal of so-called stressors in relation to his or her own coping skills (as the transactional model does), the health realization model focuses on the nature of thought, stating that it is ultimately a person's thought processes that determine the response to potentially stressful external circumstances. In this model, stress results from appraising oneself and one's circumstances through a mental filter of insecurity and negativity, whereas a feeling of well-being results from approaching the world with a "quiet mind," "inner wisdom," and "common sense".

This model proposes that helping stressed individuals understand the nature of thought--especially providing them with the ability to recognize when they are in the grip of insecure thinking, get out from it, and access natural positive feelings--will reduce their stress.

Techniques of stress management

There are several ways of coping with stress. Some techniques of time management may help a person to control stress. In the face of high demands, effective stress management involves learning to set limits and to say "No" to some demands that others make. Techniques of stress may include some of the following:

• Autogenic training
• Cognitive therapy
• Conflict resolution
• Exercise
• Masturbation
• Getting a hobby
• Meditation
• Deep breathing
• Relaxation techniques
• expressing it in art

• Fractional relaxation
• Progressive relaxation
• Stress balls

• Natural medicine

• Clinically validated alternative treatments
• Time management
• Listening to certain types of relaxing music, particularly
• Classical music
• Newage music
  

Measuring stress

Levels of stress can be measured. Changes in blood pressure and galvanic skin response can be measured to test stress levels, and changes in stress levels. A digital thermometer can also be used to evaluate changes in skin temperature, which can indicate activation of the fight or flight response drawing blood away from the extremities.

Stress management has physiological and immune benefit effects.

Effectiveness of stress management

Positive outcomes are observed using a combination of non-drug interventions:

• treatment of anger or hostility,
• talking therapy (around relationship or existential issues)
  
• biofeedback
• cognitive therapy for anxiety or clinical depression
• autogenic training