Introduction To Our Stress Management Course
Hello and welcome to the stressandstressmanagement.com membership area. By becoming a member you gain access to the course materials and extra articles and additional resources we make available to you to help you deal with stress and stress problems. Thank you for joining us, we hope this is a new beginning for you where life feels less stressful and you feel more able to enjoy it to the full.
We talk about stress a lot but we don’t often think about what exactly it is.
Stress is not a modern problem but the scale of stress problems is very much a modern thing. Stress has always existed and is a natural protection process that all animals respond to just as humans have throughout our history, but the modern world has brought a whole new raft of problems that our standard responses find difficult to deal with.
If you were a human living off the land you would be stressed by a Lion appearing nearby but you would take action to deal with it. Either kill it, hide from it or run away. All of these things are positive actions you can take and by doing them you allow your body to move on from the stressful episode.
Modern live is very different. If you have a boss shouting at you about your job, your natural reaction is to kill him, hide from him or run away. None of these are considered acceptable behavioural actions in ou modern society so we stand there and take it with our stress levels building until we are fit to burst. The stress will still be there bubbling under the surface when you get home that evening and it may well come out badly when your terseness and behavior provokes a disagreement with your partner.
This is not an uncommon scenario. We are not designed to cope with a modern world where stress arrives in the mail with the repayment demands or on the telephone when people are hassling you to buy this and buy that. Life can be full of difficulties, problems and stress and you don’t even need to leave the house for it to be a problem for you.
The workplace can be a cauldron of resentment and discontent. Most people at work today hate their jobs. They dislike where they have to work and they dread Monday mornings. The only reason they go to work there is to enable them to pay the bills and they get very little satisfaction from what they do for a living. In fact, many working people feel guilty about the work they do because they can see how their employer takes advantage of customers, just to make a profit, but it pays their wages so they have to keep on with the daily grind.
This is not how we were meant to be. We are designed to live free and make instant decisions. We are not designed to sit in one place and just accept the stressful situations we find ourselves in. We need to find a way of either getting out of that stressful situation or we need to find a way to manage our stress so that we can cope better with it when it occurs. Ideally we would like to do both of these things.
