Stress Management

Stress is a part of day to day living. As college students you may experience stress management meeting academic demands, adjusting to a new living environment, or developing friendships. Managing stress is not necessarily harmful. Mild forms of stress management can act as a motivator and energizer. However, if your stress level is too high, medical and social problems can result.

Although we tend to think of stress as caused by external events, events in themselves are not stressful. Rather, it is the way in which we interpret and react to events that makes them stressful. People differ dramatically in the type of events they interpret as stressful and the way in which they respond to such stress. For example, speaking in public can be stressful for some people and relaxing for others.


Have you ever said the words, "This job/my life is so stressful!" Or something else along those lines?
Most people believe that stress is something that happens in their lives.See Life Management Stress. They believe it is the result of outside circumstances beyond their control. We are stressed if our work is too difficult. We get stressed when people in our lives aren't doing what we want them to do. We are stressed when it's been too long since a vacation. We get stress over deaths, weddings, major purchases and a host of other things. We talk as if stress management is something outside ourselves---a condition of things in our external environment. It's not.

Health professionals will tell us that managing stress is a contributing factor in many physical ailments---heart attacks, asthma, high blood pressure, stroke and many others. There are several diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV, the diagnostic tool of therapists and psychiatrists that describe many stress-related disorders. Stress management is a killer. Have you ever wondered why some people seem to handle managing stress better than others do?


We are choosing managing stress as a proactive attempt to get something we want. This choice is almost never conscious, but I want it to become conscious for you. Once it is conscious, then you have the power to choose to do it differently if you so desire.

So managing stress is nothing but stress management.Stress management helps to understand what possible benefits or purposes one could achieve by stressing.

Benifits of stress management.
I say stressing can be motivating. Many of us perform at our peak level when we have that adrenalin rush moving through our veins. Anyone who has ever waited until the last minute to study for a test or complete a project knows what I'm talking about here.


Stressing can also be a way of telling others they better back off. I know when I felt stress, it was my unconscious goal to let my boss know she had better not ask me to do one more thing or I just might lose it! I would send out signals of overwhelm---lots of sighing, threatening looks, irritability, loss of humor. I have to admit that since I didn't do it very often, it was quite effective. Whenever I was stressed, my boss generally left me alone to do my work.
Stressing can also get us the help we need. When the message is out there, others may rally around us to support us. People may actually offer to do some things for us so we can reduce the overwhelm.

Another possible benefit is that stressing can provide us with recognition. I don't know how he/she gets all that done. It's amazing!" There are some who appreciate this positive recognition.