This continues our Cognitive approach to stress management . First step was to develop thought awareness

The second step is what we call Rational Thinking
The next step in dealing with negative thinking is to challenge the negative thoughts that you identified using the Thought Awareness technique. Look at every thought you wrote down and rationally challenge it. Ask yourself whether the thought is reasonable: Does it stand up to fair scrutiny?

As an example, by analysing your Stress Diary you might identify that you have frequently had the following negative thoughts or patterns, themes

• Feelings of inadequacy
• Worries that your performance in your job will not be good enough
• An anxiety that things outside your control will undermine your efforts
•  Worries about other people’s reactions to your work

Starting with these, you might challenge these negative thoughts in the ways shown:

• Feelings of inadequacy: Have you trained and educated yourself as well as you reasonably should to do the job? Do you have the experience and resources you need to do it? Have you planned, prepared and rehearsed appropriately? If you have done all of these, are you setting yourself unattainably high standards for doing the job?

• Worries about performance: Do you have the training that a reasonable person would think is needed to do a good job? Have you planned appropriately? Do you have the information and resources you need? Have you cleared the time you need and cued up your support team appropriately? Have you prepared appropriately? If you have not, then you need to do these things quickly. If you have, then you are well positioned to give the best performance that you can.

• Problems with issues outside your control: Have you conducted appropriate contingency planning? Have you thought through and managed all likely risks and contingencies appropriately? If so, you will be well prepared to handle potential problems.

• Worry about other people’s reactions: If you have put in good preparation, and you do the best you can, then that is all that you need to know. If you perform as well as you reasonably can, then fair people are likely to respond well. If people are not fair, then this is something outside your control.

When you challenge negative thoughts rationally, you will be able to see quickly whether the thoughts are wrong or whether they have some substance to them. Where there is some substance, take appropriate action. In these cases, negative thinking has been an early warning system showing where you need to direct your attention.

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Over the last 25 years there has been a growing awareness of the importance of stress in the workplace. Going back before this and few peopole would even recognise it let alone admit to feeling stressed. A situation faily similar to the developing world where diagnosiss of stress is more rare even though life may be much harder. Nowadays t is recognised that stress can be a killer and that many f the illnesses we suffer in modern life may in fact be stress related.

To e an effective manager you must be able to manage yourself as well as your time.  When managers are stressed thet don’t perform well as managers and don’t make good decsions and are unabe to offer support to their teams.

We believe in the workplace that stress is often related to how you use your time. For exampel if you spend excessive hours at work you are much more likley to suffer from stress. If you know of cooleagues or friends weho manage more balanced lives and get more exercise then you may instiinctively know this bolsters resilience to stress.

If there is such a thing as stress management then it must start with learning how to recognise very quickly that pressure has become “distress”. It  is easy to get tunnel vision when we are under pressure (in fact it is how our brain functions during fight or flight our peripheral vision is lost)

Learning to manage your time can certainly reduce one source of stress work overload. There may be other factors and stress management requires you to carefully analyse your situation and see what particulalr factors are affecting you . You need to be aware of these factors if you are to manage them..

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Rapid breakthrough taught by Mr. Sanders at MIT for easily lowering blood pressure and easing stress for enhanced mental potentials and greater happiness (as presented by Mr. Sanders at Massachusetts Institute of Technology). More information at www.freesoul.net and in Mr. Sanders book – You Are Psychic!

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By raising your awareness it empowers you to decide how and in what ways to act.

For example we tend to worry about the future “What might happen” and the past “What has already happened”

Experienced worriers tend to spend a lot of time worrying about things beyond their control and influence.

Worrying can be mental habit as we tend to keep going over and over the same things in our heads without really achieving anything.

A key cognitive strategy to help alleviate worry is to practice being a lot more present in your day to day life.
By focusing more on your present experience you will start to spend less time worrying.
A useful strategy is to pick a memorable image that allows you to stop as your mind starts to drift into worry. It could be a large stop sign or hand raised or whatever works for you.
When you notice yourself starting to worry then use this mental image to gain back a little control. With a little practice it will become a lot easier.

The second key strategy is to look for small practical things to do to make some progress in the area of worry.

If there is nothing practical you can do then use strategy 1 to try and spend a little less time focusing your attention on your worries.

It is not always a solution in itself but these simple ideas can be very helpful with a bit of attention.

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Videos for Insomniacs to help you relax and fall asleep. Better than sleeping pills.Lay down and turn the music low and watch about 4 of these FULL SCREEN on autoplay and you will fall to sleep and have beautiful dreams. I made these for myself as I have trouble falling asleep and they work every time and thought I would share them with others who are Insomniacs or just need to chill and relax after a stressful day. Relaxation, Meditation, Stress Relief.

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Anger management is about trying to harness your emotion and anger in a more constructive manner.
Anger can be a real source of commitment and motivation to do something practical.
But it has to be balanced and be based on the right decisions that work for others as well.

Part 4 of 6. John Schinnerer Ph.D. on free online anger management class. For FREE 216 pg. book on managing anger, visit www.siteproweb.com

So anger management can be learnt

• Learn to forgive yourself and others
• Learn to visualize what you want in terms of an outcomes
• Use techniques to control your emotional responses like breathing and relaxation.

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Simple yet effective yoga movements that can be done in the chair. Great for wheelchair-bound people as wel! Thank you Dr. Jeanine Austin for suggesting this

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Often that perception is right, but sometimes it is not. Often we are unreasonably harsh with ourselves or instinctively jump to wrong conclusions about people’s motives. This can send us into a downward spiral of negative thinking that can be hard to break.

Thought Awareness,is a simple techniques s that helps you to change this negative thinking asscoaited with stress.

We have already mentioned that the most common accepted definition of stress is that it occurs when a person perceives that

“demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilise.”

In becoming stressed, people must make two main judgements:

• First, they must feel threatened by the situation, and
• Secondly, they must judge whether their capabilities and resources are  sufficient to meet the threat.

How stressed someone feels depends on how much damage they think the situation can do them, and how closely their resources meet the demands of the situation.

Perception is key to this as situations are not stressful in their own right. Rather, it is our interpretation of the situation that drives the level of stress that we feel.

Quite obviously, sometimes we are right in what we say to ourselves. Some situations may actually be dangerous, may threaten us physically, socially or in our career. Here, stress and emotion are part of the early warning system that alerts us to the threat from these situations.

Very often, however, we are overly harsh and unjust to ourselves in a way that we would never be with friends or co-workers. This, along with other negative thinking, can cause intense stress and unhappiness and can severely undermine self-confidence.

Using thought awareness

You are thinking negatively when you fear the future, put yourself down, criticise yourself for errors, doubt your abilities, or expect failure. Negative thinking damages confidence, harms performance and paralyses mental skills.

A major problem with this is that negative thoughts tend to flit into our consciousness, do their damage and flit back out again with their significance, having barely been noticed. Since we do not challenge them, they can be completely incorrect and wrong. Yet, this does not diminish their harmful affect.

Thought Awareness is the process by which you observe your thoughts and become aware of what is going through your head.

• One approach to it is to observe your stream of consciousness as you think about a stressful situation. Do not suppress any thoughts: Instead, you just let them run their course while you watch them, and write them down as they occur.

• Another more general approach to Thought Awareness comes with logging stress in your Stress Diary. One of the benefits of using the Stress Diary is that you log all of the unpleasant things in your life that cause you stress for one or two weeks. This will include negative thoughts and anxieties, and can also include difficult or unpleasant memories and situations that you perceive as negative.   By logging your negative thoughts for a reasonable period of time, you will quickly see patterns in your negative thinking. When you analyse your diary at the end of the period, you should be able to see the most common and the most damaging thoughts. Tackle these as a priority.

Thought awareness is the first step in the process of managing negative thoughts, as you cannot manage thoughts that you are unawareof.

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So this person believes stress needs to be present and balanced in order for them to be more productive . Yeah right!

Personally I think this is faulty thinking. Yes many of us we do need a degree of pressure in order to motivate us and get us going.

Many of us are deadline “junkies”  having lots of time to complete the task but only get really focused and in the groove when the deadline is near. I would call this pressure not stress. Pressure is inevitable in most workplaces .

BUT I really believe that stress is at least in part optional. 

We can be focused working under pressure , “be in the groove”  but  in my view this is not necessarily being under stress. Many of us quite enjoy the focus pressure can bring. It may not be the best or wisest choice but self-condfidant individuals may have already picked up the bad habits of last minute cramming it or simply “winging it”.

Isn’t that what some of us learn from taking exams at school?

Stress is more self induced and negative and bad for our health and is quite different from pressure in my view.

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