What general strategies can help us the most in the face of psychological
stressors? Obviously, the first step is to accurately recognize signs of the
stress-response and to identify the situations most responsible for that. Once
you have done that, there are some ways to proceed:
· One successful strategy is to find an outlet for
life’s frustrations. Set aside time to do it and do it regularly—you can’t save
your stress management for the weekends, or for when you are on hold on the
phone. Make your outlet a benign one for those around you—one should not give
ulcers in order to avoid getting them—and choose one that you find personally
compatible. Prayer, meditation, ballroom dancing, psychoanalysis, Bach,
competitive sports—each may help some people but not others. Read the fine print
and the ingredient list on each new form of supposed antistress salvation, be
skeptical of hype, don’t believe anyone who says it’s been scientifically proved
that their brand works best, listen to your own responses with each new
exploration and trust them.
· In the face of terrible news beyond control,
beyond prevention, beyond healing, those who are able to find the means to deny
tend to cope best. Such denial is not only permissible, it may be the only means
of sanity. But in the face of lesser problems, one should hope, but protectively
and rationally. Find ways to view even the most stressful of situations as
holding the promise of improvement but do not deny the possibility that things
will not improve. Balance these two opposing trends carefully. Hope for the best
and let that dominate most of your emotions, but at the same time let one small
piece of you prepare for the worst.
· Those who cope with stress successfully tend to
seek control in the face of stressors but do not try to control, in the present,
things that have already come to pass. They do not try to control future events
that are uncontrollable and do not try to fix things that are not broken or that
are broken beyond repair. When faced with the large wall of a stressor, one
should not assume there will be a breakthrough, one single, controlling solution
that will make the wall disappear. Assume instead that the wall can be scaled by
a series of footholds of control, each one small but still capable of giving
support.
· It is generally helpful to seek predictable,
accurate information. However, such information is not useful if it comes too
soon or too late, if it is unnecessary, if there is so much information that it
is stressful in and of itself, or if the information is about news far worse
than one wants to know.
It is important to find sources of social affiliation and support. Even in
this most obsessively individualistic of societies, most of us yearn to feel
part of something larger than ourselves. But one should not mistake true
affiliation and support for mere socializing. A person can feel vastly lonely in
a crowd or when faced with a supposed intimate who has proved to be a stranger.
Be patient; most of us spend a lifetime learning how to be truly good friends
and spouses.
Two far more beautiful ways of expressing these ideas about flexibility,
resiliency, picking your battles and your weapons carefully include something I
once heard at a Quaker meeting: In the face of strong winds, let me be a blade
of grass. In the face of strong walls, let me be a gale of wind.
And the prayer of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, adopted by Alcoholics
Anonymous: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
The real world is full of bad things that we can finesse away by altering our
outlook and psychological makeup but it is also full of awful things that cannot
be eliminated by a change in attitude, no matter how heroically, fervently,
complexly, ritualistically we may wish. This caveat must be emphasized
repeatedly in teaching what cures to seek and what attributions to make when
confronted with problems. But amid this caution, there remains a whole realm of
health and illness that is sensitive to the quality of our minds – our thoughts
and emotions and behaviors. It is therefore helpful to recognize our own
capacity to PREVENT some of these problems beforehand in the small steps with
which we live our everyday lives.
