Mind Tools - Effective Stress Management

Understanding Stress

What is stress, and what can cause it?

For the purposes of these articles we consider stress to be anything that stimulates you and increases your level of alertness.

Life without stimulus would be incredibly dull and boring. Life with too much stimulus becomes unpleasant and tiring, and may ultimately damage your health or well-being. Too much stress can seriously interfere with your ability to perform effectively.

The art of stress management is to keep yourself at a level of stimulation that is healthy and enjoyable. This series of articles will help you to monitor and control stress so that you can find and operate at a level that is most comfortable for you. It will discuss strategies to reduce or eliminate sources of unpleasant stress. It will also explain what can happen when you do not control stress properly.

Most people realise that aspects of their work and lifestyle can cause stress. While this is true, it is also important to note that it can be caused by your environment and by the food and drink you consume. There are several major sources of stress:

Survival Stress: this may occur in cases where your survival or health is threatened, where you are put under pressure, or where you experience some unpleasant or challenging event. Here adrenaline is released in your body and you experience all the symptoms of your body preparing for 'fight or flight'.
Internally generated stress: this can come from anxious worrying about events beyond your control, from a tense, hurried approach to life, or from relationship problems caused by your own behaviour. It can also come from an 'addiction' to and enjoyment of stress
Environmental and Job stress: here your living or working environment causes the stress. It may come from noise, crowding, pollution, untidiness, dirt or other distractions. Alternatively stress can come from events at work.
Fatigue and overwork: here stress builds up over a long period. This can occur where you try to achieve too much in too little time, or where you are not using effective time management strategies.

The strategies that you should adopt to manage stress depend on the source of that stress. We will explain how to analyse this later.

These different sources of stress are explained in more detail in following articles.

Highly Recommended Books

For an excellent book on stress management, try The Book of Stress Survival - How to Relax and Live Positively by Alix Kirsta. This is a very pleasant, well-presented, sensible approach to stress management. It covers many important areas completely ignored by most other books.

Introduction to Stress Management

Survival Stress

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