Managing Stress pt. 1

This is the first of a three part series. In this series we will dis­cuss the sources of stress and then how to deal with them. I wrote this text a while back… So I was not fly­ing last night 😉 

Last night I was on a plane trip back home and I start­ed to talk about peo­ple being stressed in New York. When I land­ed and I was walk­ing out of the air­port I saw a fam­i­ly with three gen­er­a­tions, a grand­moth­er, moth­er and a young girl. They were com­ment­ing how just as they were get­ting out of the air­port them­selves, a per­son had pushed their way through the door with no con­sid­er­a­tion to oth­ers. They were bumped and the moth­er was clear­ly upset as made a bit to pro­tect her daugh­ter. Her con­clu­sion: “You land in this city and the stress just hits you in the face!”

Recent­ly I read a blog post by our col­leagues in the UK and they had an inter­est­ing arti­cle also on the sub­ject. I guess that stress in Lon­don is just as preva­lent as in New York… or maybe not? Do we have just a sin­gle def­i­n­i­tion for stress? Is all stress bad? Is there any­thing you can do about the stress you feel?

The clin­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of stress and the day-to-day def­i­n­i­tions are very dif­fer­ent. The stress that we most­ly think about is that of the pres­sures we feel. These can have two sources, either it comes from oth­ers — such as the fam­i­ly last night at the air­port — or it can be the pres­sure you put on your­self your per­son­al expectations.

So where do we start?

Well, if we had a com­plete stress and pres­sure free life why would we get any­thing done? If there was no pres­sure, no hunger, no heat or cold, there would be noth­ing to motive us to do any­thing, to achieve any­thing. There­fore, some lev­el of pres­sure is both impor­tant and useful.

The prob­lem real­ly aris­es when the quan­ti­ty goes beyond a cer­tain thresh­old. Up to this point things are ok, we are feel­ing that added moti­va­tion to achieve, to win, to pro­duce and to act — how­ev­er, beyond that point…. we may just feel crushed!

This may seem mun­dane, but it teach­es us a cou­ple of very impor­tant lessons as to how we can man­age our lev­els of stress and instead of feel­ing crushed, use that moti­va­tion to achieve your dreams. So let us have a quick summary:

• we all need a cer­tain lev­el of stress;
• this stress can be gen­er­at­ed by oth­ers or by ourselves;
• beyond a thresh­old it can be crushing.

There­fore, the con­clu­sion is that we need to effec­tive­ly man­age our stress to keep it from going beyond the thresh­old but also fos­ter some to allow us to keep motivated.

Sure­ly the key ques­tion is “How?!“In the DeRose Method we teach tech­niques and con­cepts which work on all the sides of the stress equa­tion. Our Tech­niques will allow you to have at your dis­pos­al a tool­box to man­age the lev­els of stress that you can feel. Our Con­cepts will pro­vide alter­na­tive behav­iors that will help you to man­age stress from sources oth­er than yourself.

Togeth­er, the tech­niques and con­cepts of the DeRose Method will then raise your per­son­al thresh­old allow­ing you to become more com­fort­able at high­er lev­els of stress so that you can ben­e­fit from the addi­tion­al moti­va­tion with­out suffering.

In the sec­ond part of this post we will give you some tips which you can do at home, call it a pre­view of some of our tech­niques and con­cepts, which will get you start­ed in the path of man­ag­ing your stress so that you can ben­e­fit from its pos­i­tive effects alone.