Source of Stress
A source of stress is any experience that triggers stress in us. There is a specific definition of a source and this is as follows:
A source of stress is defined as an external event, situation or person.
By external it means outside of us so it is something that happens to us and we interpret or think about it. In essence, all experiences are perceived by your brain as information that you think about. In fact it’s not what happens to us but how we think about it that matters. The stress response may be automatic if the event is threatening enough, but how much stress we subsequently experience after the event is entirely due to what and how we think about it!
Because the pituitary gland is so primitive in its reaction, our brains cannot tell the difference between vividly imagined and real events, or positive and negative events. We can therefore become stressed by literally thousands of potential stressors or triggers. Any person, people, event or situation could be a source of stress - so that’s a lot of potential stress! This is why our reaction to events has to be our greatest tool for counteracting the stress.
Here are some typical sources of stress: -
| Work Change Traffic jams Presentations Being late Deadline |
Children Computers Retirement Redundancy My Boss Learning something new |
Getting to the bottom of what bothers you about your personal sources of stress is very important. Really think about what or who it is that gives you anxiety. Once you have done this, it is easier to work through the remaining steps. Now you need to determine how bad your stress is.
Look at each source of stress in turn. Ask yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 how bad do I feel about this? You would need to score a 7 or above to find a significant source of stress because we all experience troublesome issues but we do not all feel the need to tackle them. To have the motivation to change something it has to bother you quite a lot!
Solutions for stress:
In the earlier part of the site I described how it is necessary to identify your sources of stress and then be specific about what is the exact problem. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to look at what you can do about sources of stress. These techniques fall roughly in to the three areas of can you adapt, can the situation be adapted in any way, or can you avoid it?
1. Can you adapt in any way?
When you have some uninterrupted time which is an opportunity to get to grips with a situation, sit down and think about what you can do to change a situation and how you are going to do that. If it is a person, think about what you want to say, how you will put your point across and practice inside your head before tackling it. BE BRAVE!It is difficult to see how you will resolve a situation unless you are brave some of the time.
2. Seek advice
Asking for support can come in many forms. In the scenario above it could be helpful to have someone act as a sounding board. This is because we can often make mistakes in being too aggressive or irritable, letting our emotions charge our speech instead of being calm and expressing ourselves well. If you are in conflict with someone this can be even more likely. Running your problem by someone else or asking for them to listen while you practice how you’d handle a situation better, can be beneficial.
There comes a time, however, when friends and family may not be the best people to help. This is not a personal statement about them but more a reflection on the difficulty of the situation. If your symptoms are contributing to a sense that you want to withdraw from the world because things are too much like hard work then you will feel less willing or able to confide in someone anyway. Learning to recognise when you need professional help is important.
Many companies are taking the responsibility of stress seriously and undertaking stress management provision in the form of paying an organisation that provides counselling services in case their employees need it. That means the first meetings you have may be paid for. Called an Employee Assistant Programme or EAP for short, they are usually accessed initially over the telephone, and face to face meetings are voluntary. If there is no provision for this in your company, see your G.P. with a view to being referred. If you have private health care this is the process they would want you to go through anyway. If you are going to pay for it yourself, there are charitable organisations you can make a donation to before you have to find a counsellor who needs to be paid. CRUSE is a bereavement care organisation, for example, and it is a charity. You can contact them for anything to do with grief counselling on 020 8939 9530 and they will tell you how to find your nearest counsellor.
If you need to pay privately for a counsellor always look for a sign that he or she are accredited by the British Association of Counselling Practitioners (BACP). Even the yellow pages will list counsellors but you need to look for the letters BACP after their names. An initial consultation can cost you approximately £100.
3. Can the situation be adapted in any way?
When we are in the middle of stressful situations it can be difficult to ‘see the wood from the trees’. We can feel overwhelmed by situations and unable to see a solution. The best thing to do is sit down and assess the problem as logically as you can. Firstly, aim to get some perspective on it. How much of the difficulty really lies with you? Allocate a percentage out of 100 that indicates as accurately as you can how much you might be a part of this. How much of the situation is the result of circumstances you find yourself in? How much involves other people and how much is out of your control completely? All these different aspects will require different solutions.
4. Can I avoid it?
The final section of the recommendations is based around whether there are any aspects of this source of stress you could change by avoiding them. Avoidance is not an easy let-out; it is often an act of self-preservation. If you had to travel to work by tube, for example, and you hated it, looking at your alternative options for transport might give you an answer. Car sharing, taking the train or looking at ways of blocking out the experience of being on the tube such as reading a book or listening to an Ipod all help. Equally, if you were asked to give a presentation, but felt incredibly nervous about doing so, there are certain things you could do that limit the time you have to stand and actually present. The greatest trick is to co-present. This offsets against your discomfort and helps the audience focus on the message you are delivering.
This list is by no means exhaustive and you may like to buy a copy of my book for a more in depth analysis of what I would recommend people try to do, but in general try to change or act on that which is within your ability to control and I feel certain you will start to feel better. The remedy for stress is almost always action because we are more confident with a determined effort and tackling bite size chunks.
When you feel things have stabilised enough or if you can take time out to examine what you are troubled about more deeply it is great to do so because deeper emotions are often very revealing even though they may seem difficult to change. These deeper feelings about situations, events and people are known as the ‘cause/s’ of our stress and they describe the part our thoughts play in the relationship between what happens to us and how we react to it. Although it is often the most difficult part of the equation to change it is the most rewarding and essential. I have termed it ‘Head First!’. Wherever possible examine how you think about something before looking at how you feel and how you respond. Put your head in gear about it and face your deepest anxieties, frustration or what I call ‘the real issue’ because you and only you can change the way you think in such a way that you feel better. This next section explains this process in more detail.
Causes for Stress
A cause of stress is any thought or feeling that triggers stress in us. There is a specific definition of a cause much as there was for a source of stress and this is as follows:
A cause of stress is defined as an internal thought, feeling or reaction.
By internal it means within us so it is something that we create ourselves. This is the biggest single key to our stress. Whatever we think about situations we experience, whether our thoughts are positive or negative can generate coping mechanisms within us or exacerbate how we feel. It is as simple as saying ‘I can do this’ rather than ‘I cannot do this’ but that doesn’t make it easy to do. If we were hypothetically able to think positively about everything we did or experience in life then we would be less stressed because positive emotions generate less distress for our bodies. We would still experience the stress response but recover from it more quickly because we’re enjoying ourselves
Causes of stress are fewer than sources and there is one simple reason for this. Everything we ever experience is thought about by us. We may not be aware of having these thoughts but we do generate them. All thought is registered via the stress response and if anything is deemed a threat, then adrenaline will be pumped in so that we can escape if we need to. We think something about everything we experience, therefore our thoughts are very powerful triggers. This is why a source of stress for one individual can be experienced by another, but that individual can have entirely the opposite reaction to it. For example, one man may be willing to jump out of a moving plane on a bungee whilst another would be frightened to death!
Examples of Causes of Stress
| Low self esteem Self-doubt Low self-worth Low self-respect Poor self-belief Poor self-image Sadness Perfectionism |
Fear of failure Fear of rejection Fear of inadequacy Being competitive Insecurity Guilt Fear of the unknown |
To determine what your causes of stress sit down with a blank piece of paper and ask yourself the following question:
WHY do I get stressed?
As soon as you ask the question why does something affect or bother you, you are tapping in to the causes of your stress. These are not ‘what’ you are bothered about but why they are an issue for you. Recognising why situations or people trouble you is the biggest step towards tackling your stress. The more you can identify how you feel about things and why you are feeling this way, the more you can tackle your thoughts in order to change or modify them.
Ask yourself ‘why’ is that situation stressful for you? Keep asking ‘why’ to every answer you come up with. For example, if you had a relative you didn’t get on well with, your source of stress would be that relative. As you examine why he or she bother you and thereby try to discover the cause of stress, the conversation you have with yourself might go something like this:
He or she bothers you because your relative says things you don’t like. Why does that trouble you? Because these comments are hurtful. So, why does that matter? Because you don’t want to spend time with someone who can be hurtful. So, why do the comments hurt? Because they are critical, you say. Yes, but why does this criticism bother you? Because I get upset about the things he or she says. Why do you get upset? Because the comments are true. Are they true? Some of them. Which ones are true? The comments about my abilities or so you believe. Why do you believe what she says? Because I have the self-doubt there in the first place.
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT! The real cause of your stress is the self-doubt you possess about your abilities and your relative ‘presses your sore buttons’. You now have two choices: either communicate this to them if you are prepared to OR reduce the time you spend with them to a manageable minimum thereby reducing the difficulty.
To recap, underneath the way you react to every source of stress is the way you think about it. Critical to the way you think is what you think about yourself. People who like themselves are less stressed because they are more tolerant of every thing they do whether that be their successes or their mistakes.
Solutions for Stress:
Self-talk or the internal chat inside our heads is very significant in the battle for effectively managing stress. This is because self-talk is so closely related to self-esteem and our ‘estimation of ourselves’ often governs whether we think we can do something or whether we think we cannot. In fact it can feel as if there are two heads inside us at times. One is negative and talks in a way that can make us feel criticised. The other is positive and talks us ‘up’. It is sometimes easy to forget that these voices are inside us and therefore controlled by us rather than outside of us.
To change your self-talk it is important to first recognise whether your self-esteem is low. We all take knocks in life but if these knocks have shaped you and potentially damaged your view of yourself then you will have a number of self-doubts and it will seem more difficult to be positive about yourself. There are many books on the market worth reading and some of these are listed on the site but I also have a self-esteem CD for sale which you might like to purchase and use it for support.
Alternatively, personal coaching is one of the most effective methods of improving both self-esteem and helping manage stress. Coaches come in various forms these days – life coaches, executive coaches and personal coaches. They all approach the subject from similar perspectives: what is the issue, how does an individual already tackle it, how could they improve the way they do things and what activities or goals will help them do this. Finding a coach isn’t difficult as a look in the yellow pages will result in a number of names to approach and although I am not a Coach by definition as I am a Psychologist, my style is to support you and proactively help you take action on your life. You can contact me at any time by completing the contact page on the site.
Counselling has already been mentioned and is the best method in my belief for helping someone change entrenched views that are destructive and damaging. You can find a counsellor with the help of the links on the site – please see this as a really important step in your life which will help you turn your life or your perspective around.
To recap then:
Stress may be felt in your body but starts in your mind! The causes of stress are possibly the most significant thing I have mentioned in this site and in my book. Recognising your own causes of stress, acknowledging that they exist, accepting them and if appropriate, doing something about them is an incredible achievement. It takes time and courage to change the way you think about yourself but it is worthwhile if you can reduce the tension, unhappiness or distress you may be causing yourself in your life.
 |
All about Stress
Sue is founder of www.sue-firth.com and you can contact her by
e-mailing : sue@sue-firth.com
or calling : 0844 800 4292
