Hello everyone,
Does any one know of any psychological techniques/strategies you use or have heard of that is good for overcoming stressful situations?
Examples-Emotional labeling, mental contrasting.
Thank you!
overcoming stressful situations?
NLP Anchoring helps a little.
Deep breathing helps a little.
PSTEC helps a bit.
But none is that great.
Breaking the problem into small bits and addressing them one at a time is both a good way to cope with stress…and a good way to solve the problem.
And, yeah, slow breathing.
Agreed
A lot of it depends on the driver of the stressful situation - for example, techniques for stress driven by workload are not going to be the same as for stress driven by interpersonal conflict, and the latter will be different depending on whether the conflict is within a relationship, or just e.g. at work.
So… what’s the context?
It depends on the source of the stress. Usually, the best way is to remove the source of the stress… if that’s possible. But unfortunately, it isn’t always. The catch is that there are many situations where people think it isn’t possible, but it totally is.
Example 1: You’re stressed out because there’s a project due for school that you’re not done with. Solution: Finish the project.
Example 2: You’re stressed out because your boyfriend/girlfriend always treats you like dirt. Solution: Dump the loser.
Yeah, this may sound obvious, but it isn’t always obvious for the person in the situation.
The best thing to do is remove yourself from those situations if possible. Especially if you are bothered by it to the extent it is causing you problems.
Next best thing is exercise and plenty of it. Our bodies react to stress as though we are being attacked. The body produces adrenaline. And the best way to get rid of that is to work it off/exercise. Example" Running 5 miles a day can work wonders!
One tactic is to see yourself from 3rd-person perspective.
Instead of, “I’'m so nervous for this exam!”, think, *"**QuantumLeap2016 *is nervous because he is about to take an exam shortly. This is an exam he has been studying for for a while but he didn’t get much sleep."
As I mention here all the time, I have found the techniques from Learned Optimism to be incredibly effective in taming my anxiety and helping me to deal with stress.
The two most effective techniques for me are:
Really clearly defining the problem: You’re stressed about work. What specifically is stressing you – that you don’t think you can complete a task by the deadline, that you don’t have the specific information you need, etc. Keep refining the issue into it turns into something that you have the ability to resolve (“I need to talk to “X” person who has the answer I need” or "I need to work on Project “Y” right now and forget about everything else).
Asking yourself “Is the stress useful?” If it leads to some way of resolving the situation that’s stressing you, then it’s useful. But if the situation is completely out of your control, asking “Is it useful?” can help you to see that and move on.
I assume you mean overcoming the emotional and mental disruptions going on in your head during stressful situations? I don’t think psychological techniques and strategies are necessarily of much good in making the stressful situations themselves reconcile, unless the stress is internal or is caused by a person or group of people towards whom you can direct those psychological techniques so as to prompt a change in their behavior. And those would be an entirely different set of techniques.
• Stop thinking of the process as one of “overcoming”; that’s an unnecessary attitude towards your own cognitive and emotional state, and one that won’t really be helpful
• Process what you feel. Don’t try to stop feeling it but treat it all as cognitive data. Interpret it, sort through it, be as clearly aware of it as you can be. Remember that feelings occur for a reason.
• Most stressful situations tend to fall into one of two broad categories: you have an internal conflict between different things that you want (or different aspects of what you want) and thus complicated mixed feelings and unclear priorities; or you have an external conflict between what you want and various factors (other people, physical world, whatever) that are preventing your progress in that direction. The former is easier to do something about via internal processing, but you gain from having a clear picture of the entire situation in the latter case as well.
• Once you’ve evaluated for the best plan for what can be done and what needs to happen next, you can usually accept that a conflict continues to exist and that you will need to reevaluate and dwell on it some more in a little while, but that this is sufficient for the moment.