Final Written Assignment M7

Stress and Coping

Stress areas in my life are time management and sleeping. I am not able to manage time and missed my deadlines. My sleeping hours has reduced from 12 hours to 4 to 5 hours which are stressful for me. Many of times, I missed my college deadlines because I couldn’t able to manage the time. The life of modern man is full of stress. Difficulties at work, lack of money, family troubles, problems with children, health problems - all sorts of problems literally surround us at every turn. Few succeed in breaking the “vicious circle” and protecting themselves from the experience. The rest continue to regularly nervous, anxious and suffer from insomnia. I am also suffering from all the issues. There are two strategies I used to do to cope with stress such as breathing and mediation.

Breathing is such a mechanical act that we pay no attention to it. However, becoming aware of our breathing helps us to relax. In addition, to combat stress you can practice deep breathing exercises, since they will help you calm down in a practically instantaneous way. Meditation is a great way to manage stress and calm the mind. Meditation helps us eliminate negative emotions and stress caused by automatic thoughts. Through meditation you can learn to focus your attention on one thing in a specific time interval. It is a self-discipline that increases the effectiveness to fix the mind on a single thing, which increases our capacity for attention and perception (Scheier, et.al. 1986). Through meditation we learn to free ourselves from all these thoughts and rediscover inner peace and emotional harmony. Meditation improves our quality of life, but it is especially indicated for these people who suffer from anxiety, stress or chronic pain, it can also help us to improve self-esteem and create a state of complete relaxation.

The breathing exercises are a very useful tool: for both stress reduction, anxiety control , let anger and clarify ideas , fall sleep , improve concentration .. etc. Regular practice is extremely beneficial. In fact they are not only useful when we are already at a high level of stress, saturation or nervousness; the regular practice of small moments of "parenthesis" during the day in which stopping and breathing is very helpful. Time management and stress management are intimately linked: lack of time stresses you and your stress makes you waste time. This relationship can be stressful and negatively affect your professional and personal life (Jackson, et.al. 2018).

With regular practice, progressive muscle relaxation offers an intimate familiarity with the tension and relaxation that allows you to feel, independently, the different parts of the body. This knowledge helps detect and combat the first symptoms of muscle tension that accompanies stress and, as the body relaxes, the mind also does so. It can be combined with deep breathing thus reaching an additional level of tension relief. Good breathing allows us to get rid of all of our toxins and the carbon dioxide that pollute our body. But it is also the key to our well-being. If we breathe badly, our brain for example, suffers the consequences because it is poorly irrigated. But if we give him all the oxygen he needs, we improve our intellectual abilities and our attention, but we also act on our thoughts and emotions(Carver, et.al. 1989).

To conclude, stress is never a good ally. It affects our physical and mental health and it is necessary that you put everything on your part to prevent it from appearing. Or for, if it inevitably arrives, to combat those negative effects it causes in us.

References

Carver, C. S., Scheier, M. F., & Weintraub, J. K. (1989). Assessing coping strategies: a theoretically based approach. Journal of personality and social psychology, 56(2), 267.

Scheier, M. F., Weintraub, J. K., & Carver, C. S. (1986). Coping with stress: divergent strategies of optimists and pessimists. Journal of personality and social psychology, 51(6), 1257.

Jackson, J. S., Antonucci, T. C., & Gibson, R. C. (2018). Social relations, productive activities, and coping with stress in late life. In Stress and coping in later-life families (pp. 193-212). Taylor & Francis.