Long-term Stress Management

Introduction : It’s in Your Hands!

We asked you in the “On the Spot Stress Management” page to take a mental note of what was happening when you felt your stress response mounting. Here is where you will need that information.

First, let’s figure out your problem-solving techniques. Do you fight or do you flee? When a stressful situation arises people’s reactions generally fall into two categories. Some face the problem head-on (fight) and others avoid (flee) it.

Fleeing

Avoiding a problem can be good in the short-run and highly appropriate in certain situations.

Examples

1. If you are clearly being followed in a dark parking lot, then running away is the best thing to do!
2. You are at a bar and someone who has had a little too much to drink picks a fight with you for no clear reason. You don’t need this type of stress, leaving the scene is the best way to go!

However, in the long-run, avoiding every day stressors thinking that they will go away can be very harmful and severely decrease quality of life.

Examples

1. You owe 2000$ to the government in taxes but you simply do not have the money. So, you tell no one and you don’t file your tax return that year or the two years after that. Until, you get a notice of the government placing a hold on your salary.
2. You and a work colleague seem to butt heads every time you are in the same room. So, you simply avoid him or her. Until, one day your boss picks you both to work on a very important project.

By avoiding the situation, your stress level may come down for a while, but this acute stress can turn into chronic stress down the road. Chronic stress is the ‘bad stress’ that can lead to health problems.

Examples

1. Now, you owe 8000$ and you have to face your spouse and face the fact that you cannot pay your monthly bills (mortgage, food, utilities). You constantly think about this and repeatedly release stress hormones. You may have trouble sleeping and have difficulty producing at work, which makes things worse because you could lose your job in the end. It becomes a never ending vicious cycle and places you under chronic stress!
2. Now you have to work with someone you cannot stand, the project is going nowhere and you become irritable and your family life starts to suffer. Here again, you ruminate about work all the time and constantly secrete stress hormones. Again, you are on a straight path to chronic stress.

Fighting

Here again, people’s reactions generally fall into two categories. You have those that use emotion-based coping strategies and those that use cognition or thought-based coping strategies.

Emotion-Based Strategies

These are usually the first ones to be used. We react emotionally to a stressful situation.

i.e. : That Janet at work just gets on my last nerve. She always contradicts what I say in front of the boss and I simply cannot work with her!

The problem with such emotional reactions is that they often lead to incorrect interpretations of the situation and peoples actions. We can become hostile and end up using maladaptive ways of dealing with the situation. One of the most common of these is getting ‘support’ from our spouse.

i.e.: You come home from work all fired up and go on a rant to your spouse saying, “Janet must be doing this because she is after my job, she wants to look good in front of the boss and is constantly undermining me”. Your spouse, who loves you, will likely agree with your interpretation and offer their full support.

Ultimately, the situation does not get resolved and can eventually become a source of chronic stress, which means the chronic secretion of stress hormones.

Cognition-based Strategies

Here, we react with our ‘head’ to a stressful situation. We approach the problem by thinking about it and trying to figure out why it occurs.

i.e.: That Janet gets on my last nerve because she always contradicts what I say in front of the boss. Why does she feel the need to do this? What really bothers me about her behavior? Is she New, Unpredictable, does she Threaten who I am, do I feel I don’t have Control when she is there?

In using cognition-based strategies we have a better chance of identifying the true source of stress and developing more adaptive ways of coping or becoming resilient to it.