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 Stress
What is stress?
Symptoms of stress
What causes stress?
Dealing with stress
Work Stress
What is stress?
Stress is a common problem (who hasn't experienced it at some point?)
Traditionally stress was thought to be the result of external stressors in our lives. For example in 1967, researchers Holmes and Rahe developed a stress scale of 43 life events (including deaths, divorces, sicknesses, house moves, new baby etc) and they tried to work out whether stressful events could cause illnesses.
More recently, researchers have pointed out that the effect of stressful events depends on an individual's perception of a situation and their perceived ability to cope with it.
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Symptoms of stress
Stress can result in mental, physical, emotional, and behavioural effects.
Mental effects include difficulties concentrating, difficulties making decisions, forgetfulness, self critical thoughts, and difficulty turning off.
Physical effects can include increased heart rate, difficulty breathing, butterflies in stomach, nausea, dry mouth
Emotional effects include nervousness, tension, moodiness, loneliness, crying, sadness, guilt and shame
Behavioural effects include difficulty sleeping, outbursts, irritation, aggression, avoidance of people or places, inactivity, drinking, or smoking.
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What causes stress?
In line with the view that it is not the situation but how we experience it that causes our stress levels to rise, anything can potentially be a cause of stress.
The biggest cause of stress for a number of people is some element of their working life. Interactions with one's partner, children, family and friends can also be stressful, as can health concerns (including exercise/diet/food related issues), loneliness and other difficult emotions.
Dealing with Stress
Dealing with stress usually involves understanding more about its specific effects on you, anticipating and planning for periods of stress, and finding the optimum level where you function best. Using a systematic approach to problem solve what you can (breaking the tasks down into smaller steps and making a plan to do the steps) also can help you feel more in control. Often the hardest thing for people is recognizing and accepting their feelings as we tend to berate ourselves harshly when we are feeling like we’re not coping.
Developing new skills, whether it be learning to say no and be more assertive, dispute perfectionistic thinking through cognitive behaviour therapy, work when you feel like procrastinating or giving up control by delegating, can be an effective part of managing stress.
Many people we see find it very difficult to take breaks and schedule pleasant activities. Using stress as a reminder to step back and to look at ones values and overall life meaning can be effective. Learning mindfulness meditation has been shown to be very effective in stress reduction. Read "Living in the present" - a blog written for Mindfood magazine or "How to live in the moment" - a column written for Mindfood.
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Work Stress
While there are techniques you can use to manage stress (e.g., slow diaphragmatic breathing, taking a walk at lunchtime, taking regular mini-breaks, increasing awareness of your own body responses and other skills), it also may be worth taking a big picture view of your stress.
For example, if you’ve identified that work is the main source of stress, there may be a number of factors to consider. These might include
workload
long hours,
changes in the organization
tight deadlines
job insecurity
sense of lack of control
a difficult or noisy work environment
insufficient skill for the job
inadequate working environment
poor relationship with others
pressure from others
harassment
Often people personalise organizational issues and feel inadequate because they are not coping, when no-one could reasonably handle that amount of work in a sustainable way.
If you feel like talking to someone about what's bothering you, please call us on (09) 361 2303
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