Understanding normal reactions to stressful situations, knowing how to handle them, and treating symptoms early can speed recovery and prevent long-term problems. That is why, in this PsychologyOnline article, we will talk about the Psychological techniques and strategies that have been shown to be effective in managing stress.
Index
- Introduction
- Formulas
- Example
- Cognitive errors
Introduction.
In addition to what has been said above, we also have more professional psychological techniques that, after much research, have proven to be tremendously effective. Let's see some:
The stress syndrome as we have said is defined as a combination of several elements: the environment or situation, thoughts (Cognitive response: what we think), physical responses (Physiological response: what we feel) and the way we respond to these elements (Motor response: what we do).
Anxiety inevitably leads us to anguish, helplessness, failure... Events, negative thoughts, and physiological activation of the body contribute to stress syndrome. The end result will be anxiety charged with such anguish that it will provoke a painful emotion. If, as we said at the beginning, a person values or perceives a situation, stimulus or event as dangerous, if in addition to this he interprets the physiological reaction of his body as threatening, it will inevitably feel fear and consequently anxiety will make an appearance, which in turn will increase fear and with it discomfort emotional.
Formulas
We can explain the stress syndrome based on these two formulas.
In the first formula, an environmental stimulus (vehicle damaged on the road) produces a physiological activation (tension and efforts required to find solutions) followed by an interpretation negative activation (I'm fuming, what a disaster, right now, with the rush I'm in, what I was missing ...) and finally a painful emotion (anger, rage, despair...). The painful emotion will depend on the interpretation we make and the amount of physiological activation manifested in each person. The greater the physiological activation, the greater the anxiety and the greater the emotional distress!
In the second formula an environmental stimulus (starting a company) if negative thoughts occur (it could ruin me, and if it goes wrong, and if I can't with it, and if I fail ...), it will cause unpleasant physiological activation (tachycardia, sweating, stomach discomfort ...) which will lead to a painful emotion (anxiety, anguish, discomfort emotional…).
Faced with these reactions, a negative feedback loop is created between mind and body that, if it lasts over time, will result in stress syndrome. To break this circuit, there will be no choice but to modify the thoughts, physical responses, or situation that triggers an alarm reaction or modify our own behavior derived from all this.
The psychological intervention of stress will allow us to use psychophysiological mechanisms in such a way that they allow us to face different situations in the best possible way. At first we defined stress syndrome as a combination of several elements: environment, negative thoughts, physiological responses, and behaviors. Anyone can break the stress circuit as soon as we intervene or change one of these elements. As soon as we act and modify one of them, we will be intervening and modifying the rest.
It does not matter in which of them we intervene Well, in order to intervene in one of them we will be modifying and breaking the chain generated up to that moment for the mere fact of doing something different from what was being done. The negative feedback loop will be modified as soon as we act differently than we were doing. Once we learn to detect negative thoughts and the physical activation that accompanies these thoughts or the derived behaviors of all this and we modify them for our own benefit, the physical activation will no longer be able to increase until we produce painful emotions, well we will learn to deactivate the stress system in its beginnings and with this we will have taken a great step towards self-control and positive change.
After years of experience and research we have found that it is essential to learn to discover the anticipatory and automatic thoughts that contribute to anxiety and discomfort psychophysiological. His knowledge will allow us to guarantee the success of the psychotherapy that we apply in each case.
Example.
"Before a group of elderly people, a woman reprimands another for being late to a meeting her, yells at her and insults her by criticizing her for having interrupted what was being treating.
Each one of the people who has seen the scene reacts and interprets in her way, one of the assistants is startled and begins to cry, another agrees, another gets angry and answers that it is not to get like that, a man criticizes her for being so intolerant, others are ashamed of the scene and shut up... "There will be as many different responses and opinions as people are in the room. room".
With this example we see how the same situation can provoke the most disparate responses and emotions. These responses will be the most varied and the immediate consequence of how each of the observers thinks, perceives, interprets and judges the problem.
It is a characteristic of the human being to be continuously describing the world himself, contributing to each of the events or experiences labels that little by little we are turning them into absolute truths based on which we think, behave and adapt to the environment. These labels will be more or less adaptive depending on how we tell ourselves things throughout the endless dialogue we have with ourselves. and that we are adorning it with interpretations that we are contributing as we are telling each other the same things over and over time to gain more and more strength, this makes us internalize it until it becomes part of our repertoire of functioning. This internal dialogue can be compared to a cascade of thoughts that flows from the mind without any interruption. On rare occasions we become aware of such thoughts as most of the time they are automatic and unconscious but powerful enough to create emotions of the most intense.
These thoughts have, among others, the following characteristics:
- They are specific messages and concrete that we give ourselves.
- They are shorthand, composed of few words or by very brief visual images.
- They are automatic and despite the fact that on many occasions they are totally irrational and absurd, we almost always believe them and assume them as absolute truths.
- They are spontaneous, they appear suddenly and bombard us without being able to stop them.
- They are usually accompanied by expressions such as: "would have to, would have to, should, and if ...".
- When they are negative they tend to anticipate all kinds of disasters, dramatizing and with a tendency to see things, even the simplest, in a totally negative, harmful and complex way.
- They are relatively idiosyncratic, In other words, the same situation can generate different thoughts and emotions depending on each person, culture and even a national, regional or ethnic community.
- They are very difficult to cut, divert or replace.
- They are fully learned thanks to the continuous repetition of them ...
Our "mind / thought" is a very powerful instrument that can increase or decrease the amount of pressure, anxiety or stress that a circumstance or situation can "produce" on us. Our education in general, coming from the family, school, society, etc., teaches us to evaluate the world and the experiences in certain specific ways, which leads us to develop various areas of sensitivity and behaviors. We also develop different expectations and beliefs about events, people, personal self-worth, abilities, and in general about the nature of things.
We can influence anxiety and emotional disorders that we experience by changing the way we perceive and interpret experiences, modifying our attitude towards events and consequently our way of responding to them. It's about having alternative goals, resources, skills, and strategies to achieve them; we review the strategies and stay with the most promising and effective ones, discarding those that turn out to be less effective. Later we put them into practice and assess the consequences of the decision made.
Many of the problems that arise and that we do not always know how to solve in an adaptive way are due to a series of errors that, without realizing them, we often make. It will be essential to learn to observe them, detect them and act accordingly, for this it will be essential to know them first so that once they are known to be able to act and resolve.
Cognitive errors.
Among the most frequent cognitive errors that cause us the most damage, we can consider the following:
- All or nothing thinking (polarized, absolutist)
- Perfectionism
- Overgeneralization or overgeneralization
- Catastrophic thinking
- Filtering or attention focus
- Amplification of the negative and minimization of the positive (selective abstraction)
- Disqualify the positive by magnifying or minifying
- Negative self-assessment
- Psychological need
- Attention focused on satisfying the other in an absolutist way
- You should, over-demanding (yourself or others)
- Personalization or self-referential thinking (self-centered attention)
- Hurried conclusions (without presenting doubts or evidence)
- Emotional reasoning
- Guess or interpret the thinking of others (mind reading)
- Prediction of the future
- Anticipation with negative prediction
- highlighter thinking, mislabeling (of self or others)
- Low self-confidence (I can't do it, I can't take it)
- Guilt (attributing blame to self or others)
- Control fallacy
- Fallacy of justice
- Change fallacy
- Be right
- Justifications or self-deception
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to Effective psychological techniques and strategies for managing stress, we recommend that you enter our category of Cognitive psychology.
