Free Stress Management Guide
Introduction Effective Stress Management
Effective stress management skills are ideal techniques and methods that allow a person to cope up with the demands of his or her environment, external or internal. Stress is a product of the interaction between one's coping ability and the demands that require testing of such abilities.
Though stress is known to be positive, it is also associated with a lot of negative symptoms that affect a person on the physical, psychological and emotional level. These skills invoke the fight or flight response in a person thus making it possible to cope with or alter stressful situations. In fact, effective stress management can be thought of in the terms of the following models.
Transactional Model
Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman put forth the suggestion that stress results from an imbalance between demands and the resources possessed by a person. Stress could be thought of as a reaction when pressure far exceeds one’s expected ability to cope with demanding situations.
Stress management was thus developed on the lines that stress is not a direct reaction to the actions of any stressor, but rather a phenomenon that creates or manifests itself as a result of severe shortcomings in one’s resources and ability to cope.
Thus, an effective stress management program would include identifying the factors typical to a person and controlling his/her stress features. And then to identify the methods that could serve to be effective ' solutions' to these factors comes next.
Lazarus and Folkman devised a model of stress based on the interactions of people with the external environment and thus the stress management techniques would focus on factors related to these. This model breaks the traditional approach towards stress by challenging the idea that a stressor and a stress are directly proportional to one another.
Effective management techniques under this model suggest that if a person were confident of his ability to handle pressure situations, he would not feel under stress. However, the pressure itself would be a potential stressor.
Health Realization Model
The health realization model, also referred to as an innate health model, was founded on the basic idea that stress may not be necessarily associated with a potential stressor. Instead of concentrating on the individual's perception of stressors in relation to his or her own stress coping abilities, the health realization model suggests that the nature of thought has a profound impact on shaping a person's stress levels.
The model states that it is a person's thinking process, which decides the response to external stimuli. In this model, stress is regarded as a by-product of an individual's appraisal of oneself through a mental state coupled with insecurity and negativity.
The model states that a quiet mind is a product of inner mind and common sense. This model puts forth the proposition that helping stressed individuals understand the importance of orienting thinking process on positive lines will go a long way in equipping them with better stress handling capacities.
