Go by the premise that stress is
relative, i.e., bear in mind that what is stressful to one person need not be
stressful to another. The purpose of the exercise in this article is to
identify individual specific stressors so that each individual can evolve
customized coping strategies. Eventually you can find out just how stressed you
really are. Go for it!
Stress generally manifests in
symptoms like:
- Difficulty in getting to sleep
- Overeating and/or loss of appetite
- Increased consumption of alcohol, smoking and substance
abuse
- Anger, impatience, moodiness
- Memory lapses and lapse of concentration
This list is not exhaustive and only
indicative. Often we may be experiencing this day in and day out and assume
that it is normal. Similar situations may not evoke similar reactions or
feelings in another person. Stress is both people specific and cumulative. It
is often one incident after another that piles up and it takes just one more
small event to burst the floodgates and be the last straw that breaks the
proverbial camel’s back.
When does annoyance turn into
stress?
Activities or events that do not
agree with our conditioning generally create a psychological dissonance and
generate annoyance. If as individuals we do not take stock of these annoyances
and realign our conditioning or lifestyles either to altogether avoid the
dissonance or accept it for want of a better alternative, we are leaving
ourselves vulnerable to annoyances escalating into stressors.
How to identify typical situations
that cause stress?
Journaling is a useful practice for
identifying typical situations or events that throw us out of kilter.
Go out and buy yourself a pocket
diary. Plan to journalize your entire life for a month. Write down incidents as
they occur and take care to record date and time of occurrence. Record them in
sequential order. For each event recoded, indicate the level of dissonance you
are experiencing.
This could be on the following five
point scale:
1. No stress at all
2. Starting to feel upset -rapid
breathing or sweating starts
3. Starting to feel annoyed, anxious
or angry
4. Moderate stress
5. Extremely stressed (feel teeth
gnashing, abusive, violent feelings, fists clenched)
The top three, i.e., those scoring
between 3 and 5 on the scale, would be the set of situations that burn the
individual out.
Over a week and then over a month,
certain patterns will begin to emerge. As an individual, each one of us will be
able to identify our top-most stressors.
If we look at exemplary events that
can cause stress between levels of 3 and 5, we observe:
1. Unscheduled dropping of children
to work – uncomfortable with sudden changes in routine
2. Traffic causing me to be late and
the aftermath in office
Based on the above, the individual
can initiate steps to eliminate the stressors from his or her life. Some of the
causal factors would probably be beyond the individual’s control, while others
definitely can be addressed and eliminated to improve quality of life.
How to confront the stressors
Now both the aforementioned
stressors are conditions that are beyond your power to control. However there
is a way to address the first stressor. Before sleeping the previous night the
individual can recheck to ascertain the alarm is in active mode. If he had
woken up in time, he would have realized the children were oversleeping and
could have woken them. Alternatively accept and embrace the change in schedule
as a temporary disturbance variable so long as it is not a regular feature of
your home life.
Regarding the second stressor of
traffic, if this is a regular feature, the best coping strategy would be to
first acknowledge the fact. Then creatively visualize workarounds. One of the
options is to convert the back seat of the car into a mobile office. Get
yourself a chauffeur to drive and enable Wi-Fi enable in the car cabin. You can
then take all calls and video conferences while being stuck in bumper to bumper
traffic. When there is no immediately pending work, you can gainfully utilize
the time for either listening to soothing music or meditation.
