1. Take It Personal
How stress
applies to you is likely to be completely different from how stress
applies to your best friend. While your stress might come from having a
demanding job and being required to meet impossible deadlines, your
friend’s stress might come from staying home alone with four young
children and trying to stick to a limited budget. Because the word stress can
mean so many things to so many different people, it’s logical that
before any one individual can put an effective stress-management plan
into practice, a Personal Stress Profile is essential.
“The word stress can mean so many things to so many different people.”
2. When It Comes to Stress, Mean Business
Think
of your Personal Stress Profile, or PSP, as something like a business
proposal. You are the business, and the business isn’t operating at peak
efficiency. Your PSP is a picture of the business as a whole and the
specific nature of all the factors that are keeping the business from
performing as well as it could. With PSP in hand, you can effectively
create your own Stress Management Portfolio.
3. The Four Parts of Your Personal Stress Profile
So, how
do you organize the huge, unwieldy list of details that comprise the
stress in your life and your response to it? Start at the top. Your PSP
has four parts:
1. Your stress tolerance point
2. Your Stress Triggers
3. Your Stress Vulnerability Factor
4. Your Stress Response Tendencies
Once you understand how much stress you can handle, what things trigger stress for you,
where your personal stress vulnerability lies, and how you tend to
respond to stress, you’ll be able to build your Personal Stress
Management Portfolio.
4. Remember: Some Stress Is Good
Although
too much stress is bad, some stress is good. Good stress can be great,
as long as it doesn’t last and last and last. Eventually, most of us
like to get back to some sort of equilibrium, whether that is a routine,
an earlier bedtime, or a home-cooked meal. Maybe you’ve noticed that
some people thrive on constant change, stimulation, and a high-stress
kind of life. Think of reporters who travel all over the world covering
stories. Others prefer a highly regular, even ritualistic kind of
existence. Think of the people who have rarely left their hometowns and
are perfectly happy that way. Most of us are somewhere in the middle.
5. Where Is Your Stress Tolerance Point?
Whichever
type of person you are, the changes in your body that make you react
more quickly, think more sharply, and give you a kind of “high” feeling
of super accomplishment only last up to a point. The point when the
stress response turns from productive to counterproductive is your
stress tolerance point, and it’s different for each person. If stress
continues or increases after that point, your performance will decrease,
and you’ll start to experience a negative rather than a positive
effect.
6. Identify Your Stress Triggers
Every
person’s life is different and is filled with different kinds of stress
triggers. Someone who has just been in a car accident will experience a
completely different stress trigger than someone about to take a
college entrance exam, but both may experience equal stress, depending
on the severity of the accident and the perceived importance of the
test. Of course, since both people probably have a different stress
tolerance point, high stress to the test taker may be moderate stress to
the car accident victim, and both people may have a higher stress
tolerance than the person about to experience the third migraine in a
week. Your stress triggers, in other words, are simply the things that
cause you stress, and your stress tolerance point is what determines
how many and what degree of stress triggers you can take and still
remain productive.
7. Calculate Your Stress Vulnerability Factor
The
stress vulnerability factor can determine which events in your life
will tend to affect you, personally, in a stressful way, and which life
events may not stress you out, even if they would be stressful to
someone else. Some people have a high stress tolerance, except when
it comes to their families. Some can ignore criticism and other forms
of personal stress unless it relates to job performance. Some people
can take all the criticism their friends and coworkers have to offer but
will wail in anguish at a pulled groin muscle. Every individual will
tend to be particularly vulnerable or sensitive to certain stress
categories while remaining impervious to others.
