Find out how stressed you are and how to confront your stressors

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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:

• Tiredness or fatigue

• Difficulty in getting to sleep

• Overeating and/or loss of appetite

• Muscle aches and pains

• Quickened heart beat

• Sinking feeling in heart

• Increased consumption of alcohol, smoking and substance abuse

• Panic attacks

• 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.

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LANGUAGE OF YOUR FACE

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 Fundamentals of communication, P.R. and leadership

 

  Many social and behavioural scientists and communication experts accept the idea that, as mammals, we humans do transmit and receive non-verbal messages. The underlying basis of this position is that if properly trained we can be able to decipher received body language messages. The validity and the reliability of this theory have not been properly established and tested but the idea is still worth thinking about in more detail. In this article, Dr Georgios P. Piperopoulos, professor of communications and public relations will analyse the use of ‘non-verbal communication’ among humans by focusing on our face. Don’t miss this.

What our smiles are all about

Erwin Goffman (1969) coined and introduced the interesting concept of ‘public smiles’. In all human cultures, in what appears to exist at a universal level, the human smile expresses a good sense of humour. It is also commonly accepted that our smile often involves elements of apology, especially in cases where some act or some verbal statement on our part could be interpreted as an attack or insult to the receiver. In such cases we smile and, obviously, we do politely apologize without uttering any relevant words. Finally, as most of us know from experience, there are instances in everyday life where we smile despite being angry, we smile despite feeling bitter, and we even proceed to swallow our disappointments with a smile.

Our face carries specific meanings
In body language our mouth and lips, eyebrows and eyes each alone, or operating in combined fashion, dramatize their own role in the process of our communication with others. Thus, pulling the lip or focusing on one area of the mouth carries specific meanings and so do specific movements of the eyebrows along with contractions of our forehead. Furthermore, although our eyeballs are only organs which carry light from visual stimuli through the optic nerve to the brain, in body language our eyes, with the help of the general area of ​​the face around them, seem to be significant transmitters of specific and meaningful messages to others we are interacting with. This materializes and is conveyed through the intensity and persistence with which we look at the person or persons standing or sitting opposite to us.

The eyes as the mirror of the soul
It is already fairly well established, as a result of relevant psychological research, that when we see something delightful the pupils of our eyes dilate, apparently with the aim to collect as much as possible of the intensely pleasant stimulus, whereas when we see something unpleasant, the pupils of our eyes constrict minimizing the inflow of the unwanted stimulus. Indeed, it is a given in world literature that the human eyes are often

Tips on how to learn to say: No!!!!

This article is based on the  eBook "Stress and Work/Life Balance"

For many of us, it is difficult to say ‘No’ to someone. Of course it depends on who were are speaking to, our relationship to them, the nature of the request and the circumstances at the time. In everyday life, ‘Yes’ just seems like the better answer… Whether it is a friend, a colleague or a member of your family, we do not want to risk falling out with them or being judged as unhelpful.

Most of us want to be liked and to have the approval of others. Of course this is all very natural, but distinctly unhelpful at times. Even more challenging is the idea of saying ‘No’ to our boss, especially if there is a whiff of redundancies in the air! Heaven forbid! But then again, saying ‘No’ can help us become more assertive and more effective in fighting stress. Below, you will find some tips on how to say ‘No’. Test them!

It’s getting easier every time you say it

There is no cure-all solution but there are techniques which are well tried and tested. Often people would say: ‘I used to have a problem saying “No” but not anymore.’ They had ‘felt the fear but done it anyway.’ They would report that it was nerve-racking the first time, a bit uneasy the next time, but after that it just became part of their armoury of protecting themselves from being taken for granted and helped them to feel more in control of their lives and especially of their time. It is not surprising that assertive people, especially those who are good at saying ‘No’, make better time managers than those who try hard to please everyone all the time. There is a close connection here.

Be matter of fact, don’t apologize!

Suppose a not particularly close friend has organized an evening get-together of old college chums every year for the past five years. It is always at the same pub, an hour’s train journey away, has become predictable and rather tedious and several of those attending just want to talk about themselves and are dreary company. Decide in advance that you will not go to the next one. When she invites you, tell her not to be offended but that you will not be going this year as you’ve got a lot on your plate at the moment and are making a real effort to ration your time. When she protests, repeat what you’ve said but add that you hope they have a great evening. Don’t appear too apologetic but instead lean towards being matter of fact. After all, it’s no big deal!

Saying ‘No’ to your boss

Saying ‘No’ to your boss requires a strong nerve and a bit of forethought! Imagine he appears at your desk at 4.30 one afternoon with a thick-looking  report and tells you he’d like you to read through it, write any comments you want to make in the margins and leave it on his desk before you go home.  At a glance it looks like at least an hour’s work. You are already rushing to keep a promise to a colleague for some information she needs before you leave no later than 5.15. Any other day would be fine but it is parents’ evening at your daughter’s school, your wife is ill and cannot go and you’ve been given a strict timetable to see several teachers with your daughter. What do you do?

Your boss hadn’t waited for a response because he’s used to you doing what he wants without question. (Let’s be honest, you are a bit of a ‘yes person’ and he’s only come to you because he expects your usual acquiescence). However, this time as he turns to retreat to his office you say, ‘Hang on, George; I can’t do that tonight.’ He returns to your desk looking pained and says, ‘What do you mean you can’t?  You repeat, ‘I can’t get that done before I go home.’ His hands go on his hips and he says, ‘Look. All I’m asking you to do is …’ You now say for the third time, ‘I can’t’, adding: ‘Normally I would, of course, but tonight I’ve got to be gone by…parents’ evening …’

You’ve now told him three times, without apology, but crucially, you now offer a constructive alternative. After a quick flick through the report you say, ‘I could get it back to you by 9.30 in the morning, would that be OK?’  He reluctantly concedes but says 9.00 would be better. He likes the last word!

You should congratulate yourself for achieving more than you might imagine.

You have:

a) displayed firm and fair assertion

b) stayed in control of your time management

c) honoured your undertaking to your colleague

d) protected an aspect of your work/life balance

e) shown your boss that you can stand up for yourself and be constructive.

The last of these is a particularly interesting one. Your boss probably felt some brief annoyance that he wasn’t getting just what he wanted, but he saw in you something of potential value which he’d not seen before. Ask yourself as manager of your team: would you prefer they were all ‘yes people’ or to have at least some who stand up for themselves? Which would you go to if you needed ideas or honest opinions?

There is much more to learn about saying ‘No’ and gaining a healthy work/life balance. If this is a topic you are interested in, you should download “Stress and Work/Life Balance – Insights for Managers” written by TAMILAGAM TIMES EDITOR TEAM .

Say ‘Yes’ to downloading “Stress and Work/Life Balance“