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).