Stress Management Training Course - 1 Day

The word stress means three things:

1. Stress denotes an event or fact that acts to trigger a stress response.
2. Stress denotes the response itself. The stress response may be appropriate or inappropriate.
3. Stress denotes an emotional state. People can feel stressed, whilst lying in a quiet, warm comfortable bed - the stress is in their mind.

Stress management training is about understanding how to manage all three meanings of stress.

How to moderate the imposition of environmental stressors.

How to respond appropriately to stressors, both physically and intellectually.

How to manage one’s emotions, so that we can maintain our emotional balance.

Stress is here to stay.
Stress is built-in to the system.
It is impossible to avoid stress completely.
And the results of trying to avoid stress results in even more stress.

Stress is not necessarily a bad thing. Sress is usually a good thing.

Sunlight stress gives us a nice tan. Stress when doing exercise makes us stronger.

Exam stress causes us to study and become better educated.

Deadline stress motivates us to work harder and longer.

Stress is good. But it can become bad if we have too much, in too short a time.
Or it becomes bad if people mismanage their reactions to events, and they overreact to minor incidents.
This course aims to show how to get the beneficial consequences of stress and simultaneously avoid its destructive elements.

Each stressor, irrespective of its specific nature, has three attributes: intensity, duration and frequency. To understand stress, we must understand the meaning of each of these terms.

The intensity of a stress is a measure of its concentration.
Is yours a highly concentrated form of stress or is it diluted?
Example: Is the concentration of UV energy in the sunshine, high, medium or low?

The duration of the stress is a measure the time of exposure to that stressor. Is the exposure: minutes, hours, days, or longer?

The higher the intensity of the stressor, the harder it is to manage.
The longer the duration, the harder it is to cope with.

Frequency is a measure of the rate of exposure in a give time frame. Once a week, twice a week, three times, or more?

The more frequent the stressor, the more difficult it is to manage.

The optimum zone is the perfect balance between the intensity, duration and frequency of stressors, such that people feel stressed and stimulated by it, rather than exhausted by it. The optimum zone is our target zone.

Hans Selye is the grandfather of stress theory. He created the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) that describes and explains how people respond to stress. Humans have a three part reaction to stress: the alarm stage, the adaptation stage, the exhaustion stage.

Our aim is to maintain our responses so that we enter into the adaptation stage of the stress response, but never reach the exhaustion stage.

Stress management is about balanced forces. Our aim is to moderate the intensity, limit the duration and frequency of stressors so that we remain balanced.

We will show you how to maintain your poise, so you are in a state of equilibrium.

If 1,000 people were exposed to the same stressful situation, then would each one necessarily feel the same amount of stress? No.

Why? Because stress has a subjective element to it.

It is possible for people to feel stressed, simply by thinking about things in a certain way.

People do it all the time. Much of the stress people feel, is self-induced.

And whatever is self-induced can, with the right guidance, be self-corrected.

Emotional stress is affected by the way a person subjectively evaluates events.

Some people evaluate a minor event, as a major threat. So, they respond accordingly.

In other words, some people habitually evaluate events in ways that trigger high levels of subjective stress.

We show you how you can become less prone to inappropriate evaluation, and thereby reduce your levels of subjective stress.

In a similar way, each person develops habitual responses to stress that they turn to, in order to help them cope. These habitual responses can be positive or negative.

Negative responses include: turning to alcohol, or food (comfort eating), or drugs, amongst other things.

Positive responses include: exercise, nutrition and sleep, amongst other things.

We will discuss the different responses, with the aim of promoting the good and abolishing the bad.

Everything requires energy to fuel its function. Stress management requires you have sufficient vitality and energy to fuel your adaptive response to life’s stressors.

We will understand the importance of vitality, energy and good health habits as part of our stress management strategy.

We will make a list of signs and symptoms of stress-related illness, so that we can spot the warning signs before they become problematic.

We will make a list of preventative and adaptive responses that we should employ, whenever people are in stressful situations.