Stress, Stress stages and How to Reduce Stress With Using Time Management
Defining Stress
Stress has a big influence upon our lives in terms of our moods, psychological and physiological well being ,social life, behavior. It has a big impact on our general health. Long term effects of stress can damage our heath. Every person has different genetics, social or family environment and also has different kinds of problems as a cause of stress. People has different kinds of coping strategies with problems and stress. Humans are tend to seek balance in their life as much as possible. Because we always know that if something is imbalanced it can lead us to have some problems and this is a possible cause for our well-being. Psychologists calls this state of being balanced or constant as ‘’homeostasis’’ . Selye (1956) used the term “stressor” to represent the effects of anything that seriously threatens homeostasis. The stressor is whatever we perceive as a threat to us. It can be work stress, love, wedding, homework, a person from social environment, being late etc. Our body always answers the stressor, always responses it in it’s own ways is called stress response in psychology. Any stressful event can cause us to ‘’fight-or-flight’’ response. Fight or fight response causes us to excrete hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. This response is also known as cure stress response. It occurs if something is terrifying either mentally or physically. Term ‘’fight-or-flight’’ was first described in the 1920’s by American physiologist Walter Cannon. When sudden relies of adrenalin and cortisol hormones activates the body’s sympathetic nervous system, it stimulates the adrenal glands and this process results as a increased heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate. After the threat is gone the body turns back to homoastosis stage in 20 to 60 minutes. The idea of this phenomenon is that when the body is stressed it will either fight with the threat or flee the threat. The treating factor can be either a real threat or imaginary threat factor. For example our body goes in a fight or flight response if the person is in a danger of car accident or when a student who is cheating on the exam is catch by the teacher. Based on the appraisal of perceived threat, humans and other animals invoke coping responses (Lazarus & Folkman 1984). As I mentioned above, every person has different patterns of stress responses. There can be a big difference in response within people for the same situation. Although genetic inheritance plays a role in determining individual difference in response to stress.
But of course not all kinds of stress are harmful and threaten, it can be even fun and motivating. For example, eustress is a kind of stress that can be fun and exciting. According to Hans Selye stress was not always bad, sometimes even a challenge is a good thing. He pointed it out as a ‘’the spice of life’’. Selye developed the idea of eustress as a person’s ideal stress level. According to Selye some people thrive on challenges. But stress means to most of the people not challenging and it literally makes sense because psychologists found that only unpleasant stressors produced the harmful stress reaction and challenges makes no harmful effect on people. On the other hand there is an acute stress and this type of stress is that what we most often encounter in a daily life. When people over-activated their autonomic nervous system because of stress, we start to see some physical symptoms. In the very first beginning of stress symptoms are mild just like headaches and increased susceptibility to colds. But it can cause much more serious health problems such as depression, obesity, sexual dysfunction, ulcers, obsessive-compulsive or anxiety disorder. However everyone has different cause to activate fight-or -flight effect. When fight or flight system is activated we tend to perceive everything in our environment as a possible threat to our survival. We tend to think everyone and everything as a possible enemy.
Another thing that Selye discovered even if someone wants to reduce or control stress, it has it’s limits. General Adaptation Syndrome model has three components that describes the body’s response to stress. Alarm stage,resistance stage and exhaustion stage. In the alarm stage the body thinks that the stressor as a threat or danger to balance and releases the stress hormones such as adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol. In the second phase which is resistance stage, after the body responded the stressor the stress level is likely to reduced. The body defenses more weak because it needs to repair the damaged muscle tissues and lower the production of the stress hormones. In the third phase that is exhaustion stage, the stress has been persistent for a longer period. The body starts to lose its ability to struggle with the stressor and reduce its harmful impact because the adaptive energy is gone. If the stressor still causes threat for the person, and if the body loses its all energy to find the balance that can lead to some health problems.
What kind of stressors are available?
As a human being, we can be very easily get stressed. The body finds itself in a vulnerable phase of life and boom! Causes of stress are various, however people usually have similar stressors but have different stress management styles. A person could be unhappy with his/her job or just could have too much responsibility , could have long work hours, could have poor management skills about university, or even good managements skills, the person just could decide the certain position is not the best for the person so wants to quit etc. That would be more than hundred pages if we try to write stressors because these are all the things that takes us away from the sleep. Divorce, getting married, moving to a new home,emotional problems,any traumatic event such as rape, violance and so on…
What i want to focus on with my paper is how to manage and reduce stress. As a 3rd year Psychology student i am thinking of my life and i guess every student has the same stressor. But it is not important to have the same stressor if you don’t share the management skills. Stress management techniques intended to equip a person with effective coping mechanisms for dealing with psychological stress. There are several techniques to reduce stress such as self-talk, meditation, exercise, breathing exercises, having more positive attitude and self management, more self-knowledge.
How to Reduce and Manage Your Stress With Time Management??
There are several techniques to reduce the stress level. It can be becoming more organized and reducing the generation of clutter. The more you know about yourself and your needs the more you point out the things that makes you stressed.
Time management (TM) is one of the most effective technique to stress of life, especially for procrastinators. People think that postponing things is reducing their stress. I think it has two faces. One, you reduce your stress for the moment because you just escape of your responsibilities second and the non-escapable result of procrastination is it increases the stress level worse than it was before.For example a person can say ‘’Well yeah, I need to work on this project as soon as possible, of course i will do that but firstly i will check out my Facebook, it will take just 5 minutes, it won’t take much time and i’m starting.’’ than you lost 1 hour on Facebook. Or a friend is calling when you are planning to sit down and work on your upcoming exam, and asking you to meet up and drink something, there is an amazing weather out there. Than you lost a day. We always think that we have the power to pospone thing to a later time because we think we can handle it however. But when you sit down to work on your project after a long postponing, you suddenly realize you have to work on it more then you think because your time is more limited now and you have already forgotten the important details about the project thus you must spend more effort on it. You get stressed by your responsibilities more and more by doing that because of lack of time and information.
There will be always some interruptions during your work. It can be an important call, or non-important call from you best friend or you might feel so hungry that you can’t start it without cooking something. It’s important how you handle the interruptions over your work. Sometimes you have to say ‘’no’’ to your best friends bids even it’s very warm and sunny outside.
Sometimes we can just feel hopeless about the work that needs to get done. ‘’Oh my God, there are too many things to read, too many details… and i have no idea how to get all the information.. Okay, i’m not worrying, just postponing to a more motivated day in this week’’. That ‘’more motivated day’’ may never come. It can be lack of information about what needs to be done and we may not feel comfortable to asking about it to our friends thus we get more and more stressed and wasted more time also. Sometimes we even have sleepless nights because of over-thinking about our responsibilies but even the sleepless nights we have, we just can’t start to work on it because of lack of managing time.
How to Start Time Management
If you want to get rid of some level of stress over your life-only if you want it- you should aware of what you are doing that leads you to get stressed. Is it an exam, a grade, a project, the time you spend with your family or your friends, your health in general or detailed(eg. smoking or consuming alcohol) or your career. Deciding what is leading you to get stressed is the most important stage here. Because if you don’t know exactly why do you get stressed, then how are you going to be able to fix the problem? Find out what is the problem, the exact stressor, what is it? You should spend some time and effort by thinking about your life, yourself and your current being. If it’s too hard to understand your current being of yourself you can ask others. Your close friends or your family might observe you better than you observe yourself and they might see different perspectives of yours and a person who wants to see you in a better psychological mood would help you greatly. You can discover some different perspectives of your difficulties with their help and perhaps they can tell you why you are over-stressed.
While you are thinking over to fix and manage your time and life, try to not to blame yourself because of your faults or your habits. Or never think that working as racehorse would make you feel happier. In this way we are trying to figure out firstly what are our needs, and secondly why we are failing to reach them. What actions might cause us to fail and forget about our responsibilities. For example if it’s lack of motivation than we can think about why do we lack of motivation, what is the key factor here and secondly how can we increase our motivation in this case. In which way you manage your time would make you feel more organized. what factor/factors could be lead us to get these problems, where do we make the common mistake of us. Than we will find out which way of planning would reduce our stress level. And always keep in mind that managing your time to reduce your stress for the current position of yours will not fix all the problems in your life forever. This is life and people always strive for superiority. After you are done with this stressor, another event will come to stress you and will make you to think about your life. But never worry about certain things, they will be all gone after a few time.
Stress and time management have many causes and many techniques to fix it, usually more than one. But it is a very thin line. Do not get stressed by managing your time, however you would not need so many ways to do that, the most important thing is to find out what actions or thoughts of yours causes you to get stressed.
Sometimes we just feel that our life is out of control. Of course we are not able to control everything around us, and if we try to have control over everything that is related to our life than.. Boom!! We just become a control freak and unfortunately life is not something we can control al the time. Surprises are always out there,waiting for us. But however if you are in the mood of uncontrolled life, managing your time will make you feel more under control, a more planned life and thus helps you to get more calmer state of mind.
You can start by thinking about the steps that needs to be done and then you can write them down in order they must be performed. By the time you do your ‘’to do list’’ try to not to focus on busyness, instead try to focus on the outcomes.
Stress can be a good thing sometimes but it would never make you feel good with long term effects.
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