Stress Management

1
Stress Management

• Global Leadership Program Year One

2
Agenda

• Defining Stress
• What Stresses You Out?
• Responding to Stress
• Effects of Stress
• Managing Stress
• How Stressed Are You?
• Stress Planning Process

3
Defining Stress

• Stress is a condition or feeling experienced when
  a person perceives that demands exceed the
  personal and social resources the individual is
  able to mobilize
• Stress Pressure gt Resources

4
What Stresses You Out?

• Internal Stressors
• External Stressors

5
Symptoms of Stress

• Physical
• Mental
• Emotional
• Behavioural

6
Responding to Stress

• When an animal experiences a shock or perceives a
  threat, it quickly releases hormones that help it
  to survive.
• Adrenaline rush!

7
Positive Effects of Pressure

• Sometimes the pressures and demands that may
  cause stress can be positive in their effect.
• One example of this is where sportsmen and women
  flood their bodies with fight-or-flight
  adrenaline to power an explosive performance.
• Another example is where deadlines are used to
  motivate people who seem bored or unmotivated.

8
And the Negative...

• In most work situations, our stress responses
  causes our performance to suffer.
• A calm, rational, controlled and sensitive
  approach is usually called for in dealing with
  most difficult problems the instinctive fight
  or flight response is not usually the most
  appropriate!

9
Pressure Performance
10
Managing Stress

• There are three major approaches that we can use
  to manage stress
• Action-oriented
• Emotionally-oriented
• Acceptance-oriented

11
Action-oriented

• In which we seek to confront the problem causing
  the stress, changing the environment or the
  situation
• To be able to take an action-oriented approach,
  we must have some power in the situation. These
  are techniques that we can use to manage and
  overcome stressful situations, changing them to
  our advantage.

12
Emotionally-oriented

• In which we do not have the power to change the
  situation, but we can manage stress by changing
  our interpretation of the situation and the way
  we feel about it
• Emotionally-oriented approaches are often less
  attractive than action-oriented approaches in
  that the stresses can recur time and again
  however, they are useful and effective in their
  place.

13
Acceptance-oriented

• Where something has happened over which we have
  no power and no emotional control, and where our
  focus is on surviving the stress
• Sometimes, we have so little power in a situation
  that all we can do to survive it. This is the
  case, for example, when loved-ones die.
• In these situations, often the first stage of
  coping with the stress is to accept ones lack of
  power.

14
How Stressed Are You?

• On the next slide,
• Identify what takes up your time in the outer
  circles (youre in the middle)
• Draw 1, 2, or 3 arrows from you towards your
  activities indicated how much time you spend on
  each activity
• Draw 1, 2, or 3 arrows from each activity towards
  you indicating how much you get back from
  completing each activity

15
How Stressed Are You?
16
Stress Planning Process

• List and prioritize the sources of stress in your
  life
• Work out how to target each source of stress
• Goal Setting
• For each of the following categories, what do you
  want for yourself this week, this month, and a
  year from now?
• Education, Relationships, Spiritual, Altruism,
  Health, Recreation, Material Objects

17
Stress Planning Process

• Dealing with stress right now
• 10 slow breaths
• 4 second inhale, 4 second exhale (repeated
  several times)
• 4 second inhale, pause for a few seconds, 4
  second exhale, pause for a few seconds (repeated
  several times)

18
Stress Planning Process

• Dealing with stress overall
• Sleep enough
• Exercise appropriately
• Eat right
• Relax