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| comfort zone > de-stress not distress relaxation skills visualisations |
stress chart
From
one extreme to another – oh for a happy medium!
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How you respond to stress will depend on your personal style of coping which is shaped by the following factors:
- characteristics you have inherited
- your childhood influences and general upbringing
- your unique personality
- your current environments at work, at home, at play
- your previous experience of handling stressful situations
- the number of stress factors at any one time
- the degree of control which you personally have in a given situation
Nowadays
stress is often treated in conversation like an illness –
you can even be off work with ‘stress’! However by viewing
‘stress’ as an illness, we allow ourselves to play the
helpless victim role. As such we may fail to see how we let our
past conditioning dictate our present methods of coping, or not
coping well, with situations or people.
It is important to recognise that the kind of stimuli which lead
to so-called ‘stress’ are an essential part of life.
They are the same stimuli which help us to create new ideas and
to lead an interesting life.
Ultimately we have freewill to choose how we re-act in a particular
set of circumstances. We can check this out by being ‘mindful’
of our choices when tension builds up and some kind of change
is necessary.
We can make our lives ‘stressful’ – or we can choose
to use potentially stressful stimuli in a purposeful way to initiate
change. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining’ and it’s
true for stress as well. Whatever problems you have to deal with,
look out for ‘learning opportunities’, and work out
practical ways in which you can counteract the negative aspects
of stress in your life.