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As working life and life generally have become more complex and more stressful, coping is an aspect of personal development that has gained increased attention. Time management, problem solving and ways of working are practical aspects. However, the underlying behavioral issues involved also need to be recognized.

Stress management involves both stress tolerance (your ability to withstand adverse events and strong emotions by actively and positively coping with stress) and impulse control (which assesses your ability to resist or delay and an impulse to act and to control your emotions). Those with low emotional intelligence have difficulty with both. Low emotional intelligence involves four important features:

* difficulty identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal

* difficulty describing feelings to others

* externally oriented thinking (a poor fantasy life) and

* a cognitive (understanding) style that is literal and focuses on the minute details

For some, it was not that they were without emotion (they could use words like sad or frightened); they could talk about the events that surrounded the emotions but because their inner resources were limited they could not get to the meaning below the surface.

There are three general ways people cope in stressful situations (called general coping styles):

* problem-focused or task-oriented coping – thinking about how you have solved similar problems in the post, analyzing the problem before you react, and considering several different to the problem (used mostly by those with good emotional intelligence)

* avoidance-oriented coping – trying to distract yourself by watching TV, buying yourself something, going out for a snack or meal, or socializing with others (both groups are likely to use this strategy but this way of avoiding stress may lead to psychological and somatic problems and can be a poor choice of coping strategy)

* emotion-oriented coping – telling yourself that the situation is really not happening and becoming preoccupied with aches and pains and becoming angry (used the most by those with low emotional intelligence)

Those with low emotional intelligence use poor methods to regulate their emotions. They tend to binge on food or develop a headache (they also tended to have sexual and aggressive fantasies and behavior, and engaged in reckless activities and drank alcohol) for example, whereas those with higher emotional intelligence used adaptive behaviors, such as thinking about and trying to understand distressing feelings or talking to a caring person.

It's important to note that acting as if the stressors in your life are not bothersome may be the most dangerous to health. In one set of studies, recent stressors and coping abilities were measured in more than 1,500 women sent to a specialist because of a lump or tenderness in a breast. Those women who were experiencing the most stress, but at the same time denied its existence, were especially likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer.

(However, women who - for example - indicated that they were comfortable expressing anger were less likely to receive this diagnosis. It looks as if anger is a double-edged sword. Too much results in one kind of health problem and too little another)

In fact, coping is intimately connected to self-esteem. People's expectations about their abilities to perform particular tasks largely determine the extent to which they persevere with those tasks and how successful they are with them. People develop specific beliefs about their abilities to perform certain tasks in certain situations by synthesizing information from a variety of sources including:

1. Previous experience with the activity and setting
2. Observations of other people's behavior in similar situations
3. Verbal information
4. Interpretation of their own psychological and physical arousal states (for instance, interpreting butterflies in their stomach as anxiety rather than anticipation).

People's behavior is therefore highly influenced by whether or not they think they can successfully carry out what needs to be done to produce an outcome they want. In other words, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. Which do you want to believe?

Click here for the ways that research has identified as most successful for achieving mastery.