Stress Management Program

 

STRESS MANAGEMENT PROGRAMMS

Stress management programs typically involve three phases.

In the first phase, participants learn what stress is and how to identify the stressors in their own lives. In the second phase, they acquire and practice skills for coping with stress. In the final phase, they practice these coping techniques in targeted stressful situations and monitor their effectiveness (Meichenbaum & Jaremko, 1983).

1.     Assertiveness Training

The person is encouraged to identify the people in the environment whjo cause them stress called stress carriers and develop techniques for confronting them.

2.     A Stress Management Program

 A program called Combat Stress Now (CSN) makes use of these various phases of education, skill acquisition, and practice.

i-                   Identifying Stressors:  In the first phase of the program, participants learn what stress is and how it creates physical wear and tear.

ii-                Monitoring Stress In the self-monitoring phase of the program, students are trained to observe their own behavior closely and to record the circumstances that they find most stressful.

iii-              Identifying Stress Antecedents Once students learn to chart their stress responses, they are taught to examine the antecedents of these experiences. They learn to focus on what happens just before they experience feelings of stress. For example, one student may feel overwhelmed with academic life only when contemplating having to speak out in class,.

iv-              Avoiding Negative Self-Talk Students are next trained to recognize and eliminate the negative self-talk they go through when they face stressful events. For example, the student who fears speaking out in class may recognize how self-statements contribute to this process: “I hate asking questions,” “I always get tonguetied,” and “I’ll probably forget what I want to say.”

v-                Completing Take-Home Assignments In addition to in-class exercises, students have take home assignments. They keep a stress diary in which they record what events they find stressful and how they respond to them. As they become proficient in identifying stressful incidents, they are encouraged to record the negative self-statements or irrational thoughts that accompany the stressful experience.

vi-              Acquiring Skills The next stage of stress management involves skill acquisition and practice. These skills include cognitive-behavioral management techniques, time management skills, and other stress reducing interventions, such as exercise.

vii-           Setting New Goals Each student next sets several specific goals that he or she wants to meet to reduce the experience of college stress. For one student, the goal may be learning to speak in class without suffering overwhelming anxiety. For another, it may be going to see a particular professor about a problem. Once the goals are set, specific behaviors to meet those goals are identified.

viii-         Engaging in Positive Self-Talk and Self- Instruction Once students have set realistic goals and identified some target behaviors for reaching their goals, they learn how to engage in self-instruction and positive self-talk. Self-instruction involves reminding oneself of the specific steps that are required to achieve the goal. Positive self-talk involves providing the self with encouragement.

Coping and Stress Management Techniques

 

COPING AND STRESS MANAGEMENT

COPING INTERVENTIONS

Not everyone is able to cope with stress successfully on their own, and so interventions for coping with stress have been developed.

1.  Mindfulness Meditation and Acceptance/Commitment Therapy

Mindfulness meditation teaches people to strive for a state of mind marked by heightened awareness of the present, focusing on the moment and accepting and acknowledging it without becoming distracted or distressed by stress (Davidson & Kaszniak, 2015). Mindfulness can improve quality of life, reduce anxiety, and improve coping, and so it has been the basis of interventions (Schirda, Nicholas, & Prakash, 2015). Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is a systematic training in mindfulness to help people manage their reactions to stress and the negative emotions that may result (Dimidjian & Segal, 2015; Jacobs et al., 2013). Thus, the goal of mindfulness meditation is to help people approach stressful situations mindfully rather than reacting to them automatically (Hölzel et al., 2011). Mindfulness and MBSR can mute biological responses to stress as well.

                2        Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)

2-      Similar to MBSR, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a CBT technique that incorporates acceptance of a problem, mindfulness regarding its occurrence and the conditions that elicit it, and commitment to behavior change. Because stress can create thorny problems, sometimes people need to move away from difficult thoughts and feelings and simply accept them while still persisting in desired actions, such as trying to overcome a stressor. The goal of ACT is to try to change the private experience and thereby maintain commitment. ACT does not challenge thoughts directly, but instead teaches people to notice their thoughts in a mindful manner and from a distance so as to be able to respond more flexibly to them. Acceptance and mindfulness therapies can improve the quality of life while people are coming to grips with the stressors they experience.

                       3    Expressive Writing

3-      Expressive Writing Disclosing emotions can have beneficial effects on health. For many years, researchers suspected that when people undergo traumatic events and cannot or do not communicate about them, those events may fester inside them, producing obsessive thoughts for years and even decades. This inhibition of traumatic events involves physiological work, and the more people are forced to inhibit their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, the more their physiological activity may increase (Pennebaker, 1997). Consequently, the ability to confide in others or to consciously confront one’s feelings may reduce the need to obsess about and inhibit the event, which may, in turn, reduce the physiological activity associated with the event. These insights have been explored through an intervention called expressive writing (Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016). studies have found that when people have talked about or written about traumatic events, psychological and physiological indicators of stress can be reduced.

These interventions may lead people to change their focus of attention from negative to positive aspects of this situation (Vedhara et al., 2010). Talking or writing about traumatic or stressful events provides an opportunity for clarifying one’s emotions (Lepore & Smyth, 2002) and for affirming one’s personal values.

        4.     Self-Affirmation

4-      Self-Affirmation  Self-related resources, such as self-esteem, can help people cope with stress. A technique that makes use of this insight is called Self-affirmation. When people positively affirm their values, they feel better about themselves and show lower physiological activity and distress (see Sherman & Cohen, 2006, for a review). Writing about important social relationships appears to be the most impactful self-affirmation task (Shnabel, Purdie-Vaughns, Cook, Garcia, & Cohen, 2013). Self affirmation can reduce defensiveness about personally relevant risk information and consequently make people more receptive to reducing their risk.

                5. Relaxation Training

5-      Relaxation Training  A set of techniques—relaxation training—affects the physiological experience of stress by reducing arousal. Relaxation therapies include deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation training, guided imagery, transcendental meditation, yoga, and self hypnosis.

What are the benefits?

These techniques can reduce heart rate, muscle tension, blood pressure, inflammatory activity, lipid levels, anxiety, and tension, among other physical and psychological benefits. Even 5–10 minutes of deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation can be beneficial. Yoga may have health benefits. Joyful music can also be a relaxing stress buster.

Coping Skills Training

Teaching people effective coping techniques is another beneficial intervention individually, in a group setting, or even by telephone (Blumenthal et al., 2014). Most of these interventions draw on principles from CBT (Antoni, Carrico, et al., 2006). Coping effectiveness training typically begins by teaching people how to appraise stressful events and disaggregate the stressors into specific tasks. The person learns to distinguish those aspects of a stressor that may be changeable from those that are not. Specific coping strategies are then practiced to deal with these specific stressors. Encouraging people to maintain their social support is also an important aspect of coping effectiveness training (Folkman et al., 1991).