Stress Management

Sunday, 9th March 2008

Last week I was a bit stressed out with overwhelming workloads, so this week I thought I’d take some time to write about stress management - a topic that is very common to all of us. I thought I’d look at what exactly is stress, what causes it and what are some tips that we can all do to help manage stress in our day to day lives. In researching this topic I came across a fantastic article published by The Department of Mental Health in WA that outlines a lot of interesting points about stress.

Firstly, what is stress? It’s a common perception that stress is associated with worry as most things we seem to stress about worry us a lot. For example we might worry about making repayments on our mortgage, or if we’re going to lose our job and these things make us “stress out”. Another definition of stress is from Dr Hans Selye who specialises in stress theory. Dr Selye believes that stress is “the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it”, and that the demand can be a threat or a challenge which requires the body to adapt immediately.

You’ve heard of people performing well under pressure? Well that is an example of “good stress” also known as eustress. And then there is the bad stress that makes us sick. This is known as distress.

The other definition of stress comes from Richard S Lazarus that explains stress as a condition experienced when a person perceives that “demand exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilise.” I think this definition is a good one as it catagorically explains why stress occurs in most people - its a perception that they cannot cope with the required task and thus “stress out”.

So now we know what stress is, what causes stress? The Mental Health article also lists both internal and external causes of stress. Some of them include:

1. physical environment 2. social interaction 3. organisational deadlines 4. major life events 5. daily hassles such as mis-placing keys, vehicle breakdowns etc etc.

The article also describes a few common symptoms on stress under four main areas:

• Physical
• Mental
• Emotional
• Behavioural

Finally, some tips on how to manage the stress in your life:

- Work out exactly what is stressing you out and then look at why this is stressing you out

- Learn to relax in moments of stress; learning meditation and other relaxation techniques really help you deal with stress in the heat of the moment.

- Eat nutritious meals and get enough sleep as resting lets your body rebuild itself

- Create “stress free” times when you get out of the house/office and go do something that you love. eg. gardening, visit the gym, go for a drive.

- Learn proper time management techniques. This might seem trivial but a large majority of items that stress us out in our lives are related back to us worrying about not completing tasks within a certain timeframe. Learning good time management skills will help us to deal with such instances.

And there you have it, a VERY basic overview of stress and how to deal with it. So this week I challenge you to work out what is stressing you out, and what you can do to deal with it.

Dream, Build, Inspire, Lead!

AJ~

Author: AJ Kulatunga

Category:

stress management, relaxation, meditation