What Is Stress?
Stress is the mental, physical, emotional, and behavioral reactions to any perceived demands or threats. Stress can be anything that stimulates you and increases your level of alertness.
Change and stress go hand in hand; they are both facts of life. The same way that all changes are not negative, all stresses are not negative either. In fact, you need a certain amount of stress in your life to function at your best. Some stress can bring excitement and challenge to your life. The key is to have the right type and amount of stress so you will not feel overwhelmed.
Excerpt from Change Thrivers – Your Resource Guide For Making Change Work
Levels of Stress
Acute Stress
The most common form of stress is acute stress. It comes from demands and pressures of the recent past and anticipated demands and pressures of the near future. Acute stress is thrilling and exciting in small doses, but too much is exhausting.
Episodic Acute Stress
Some people suffer acute stress frequently, and their lives are so disordered that they are continually experiencing chaos and crisis. They’re always in a rush, but always late. If something can go wrong, it does. They take on too much, have too many irons in the fire, and can’t organize the slew of self-inflicted demands and pressures clamoring for their attention. They seem perpetually in the clutches of acute stress.
Chronic Stress
While acute stress can be thrilling and exciting, chronic stress is not. This is the grinding stress that wears people down day after day, year after year. Chronic stress destroys bodies, minds and lives. It causes chaos through long-term slow destruction. It’s the stress of poverty, of dysfunctional families, of being trapped in an unhappy marriage or in a despised job or career.
Burnout
A state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by unrealistically high aspirations and illusory and impossible goals.
The Stress Solution by Lyle H. Miller, Ph.D., and Alma Dell Smith, Ph.D.
Managing Stress
Breathing Technique
- Sit or lie down comfortably.
- Take a slow deep breath and imagine pulling all the tension in your feet and legs into your lungs—then push them out with a gentle exhalation.
- Take another slow and deep breath, this time visualizing the tension in your hands and arms expelling with your exhalation.
- Repeat the slow, deep breathing and release the tension in your back, neck, shoulder, head, face, chest, and stomach.
- Devote a full breath for any particular part of your body that is especially tense.
Excerpt from Change Thrivers – Your Resource Guide For Making Change Work
Action Plan to Manage Stress
Reflect on and Journal – “Causes of My Stress”
- The issues that cause me stress are…
- Actions I can take to contain, control, or eliminate problems that cause me stress…
- Actions I can take to improve my health and environment that can help me deal with stress better…
- Stress management techniques that I will incorporate into my life…
Excerpt from Change Thrivers – Your Resource Guide For Making Change Work
