What Stress Management Can Do For You
With stress management, you learn general information about stress. What is stress? What are the sources of stress in general? How does the body respond to stressful events? What are typical behaviors that people use who experience too much stress? (such as taking a walk, talking with a friend, smoking cigarettes)

You also learn to examine the ways you handle stress. You evaluate the methods you use for dealing with stress by asking: Are your methods healthy and effective ways for reacting to stressful conditions and events?

You can learn to replace unhealthy methods of reacting to stressful situations with healthy and effective methods. And, you can learn qualities and characteristics of those who are highly effective in stressful conditions. These individuals have stress resilience or stress hardiness. Learning the qualities of stress hardy individuals enhances your ability to deal with stress.

Overall, with stress management, there is general information about stress. Then there is analysis of stressors in your life and your methods for dealing with them. This information and analysis is supplemented with training to develop practices and healthy behaviors to deal with stress effectively.

Stress Management:

• General information about stress
• Analysis of stressors and current methods for dealing with them
• Training to do practices and to follow healthy behaviors to manage and control stress

What Is Stress?
Stress is a response to danger or demand in the environment that disturbs an individual's balance, mentally or physically.

The causes of stress are called stressors. Stressors vary in type and in severity. Physical stressors include cold and extreme heat. A common stressor in everyday life is having the feeling of having too much to do. Rushing to make appointments and having a packed schedule often results in stress.

Other kinds of stressors are Major Life Changes such as divorce, illness, injury, marriage, getting a promotion, changing residence.

In the 1950's two cardiologists, Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, discovered that a major life change often occurred before an individual developed tuberculosis. Curious about this association, they investigated the link between life changes and the onset of illness. They devised a questionnaire that listed various changes that occur in individuals' lives. They asked hundreds of people to indicate how much adjustment was required to deal with changes, such as divorce, injury, loss of a job, change in work, change in residence.

Stress was identified as the amount of adjustment needed to deal with these events. The greater the adjustment required, the greater the stress associated with the event. The greatest stressors, the ones that caused the largest stress reaction, were death of a spouse, marital separation, and death of a family member. Change can be positive and still produce stress. Vacations and personal achievement create stress because they bring change and require adjustments.

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