Stress
Stressful situations happen in everyone’s daily life, trying to avoid ever being in a stressful situation is not possible.
However, you can change how you deal with them. The plans you make can change how stressful a situation is for you.
You can start to change how you deal with stressful situations by doing the following things:
• Write down the situations and interactions that cause you the most stress.
• Think about which part is potentially the cause of the most stress and how it makes you feel and your reaction.
• Try and analyse if it’s the situation that can be adapted or your attitude and approach. Is it that the situation can be made less stressful by taking your needs into account and adapting. Or is it that the situation can not be changed and therefore it is your approach that needs to adapt.
• Make a plan based on the outcome of your analysis to help you cope next time you’re in the same situation.
It may be useful to involve another person in the conversation, they can confirm if you are being fair and realistic. It is about having a coping strategy rather than avoiding all stressful situations.
You may want to use the planning document to track the changes you make and how effective they are, or you could use it to plan for a potentially stressful event or task.
If a change of approach that is needed, then you could try using this app – WOOP.
The Mind Matters section of Confidence College could also help in understanding your thoughts.
Using the planning document, see if you can put a plan together based on the outcome of your analysis.