The Prevention of Stress

There are quite a few ways of coping with stress. Most of them are well known: regular active recreation, relaxation (yoga, meditation, autogenic training), training in behavioral self-control skills, planning one's own time, ensuring sufficient sleep duration, and so on.

Foreign organizations practice methods such as including payment for gym or pool memberships in an employee's benefits package. Some of them try to make sure that employees are informed of specific, simple techniques that help cope with stress. For instance, the management of the BBC published an expensive booklet explaining to staff how they should sit on chairs. This 57-page brochure, devoted to reducing the amount of stress in the workplace, contains a great deal of other valuable information as well. In particular, it includes a detailed diagram of how, in a truly hopeless state, to fold a paper airplane. If even that fails to help cope with the difficulties that have arisen, employees are advised to smell a lavender flower and gaze at a photograph of an alpine landscape.

However, such measures alone are not enough. The problem must be approached comprehensively — not merely helping employees cope with stress that has already become severe, or with its consequences, but preventing it at the level of social tension. Since social tension is felt by a person as a threat, a danger, the psychophysiological reaction to it can arise for subjective reasons connected with the characteristics of that particular personality.

A great deal depends on individual personality characteristics. Emotional tension, for example, increases as the differences grow between the conditions in which a person was formed and the newly arisen conditions. This means that certain conditions cause emotional tension not because of their absolute severity, but because of a mismatch between the individual's emotional characteristics and those conditions.

There are two types of interrelated adaptive mechanisms.

The allopsychic mechanism operates when there is a modification of behavioral activity. Modes of action:

• • changing the situation;
• • withdrawing from it;
• • changing one's attitude toward it.

The intrapsychic mechanism reduces anxiety through the reorientation of the personality. For this, there are several types of defenses used by the intrapsychic mechanism of psychic adaptation:

• • preventing awareness of the factors causing anxiety;
• • fixating anxiety on certain stimuli;
• • lowering the level of drive, that is, devaluing the initial needs;
• • conceptualization.

The effectiveness of psychic adaptation depends directly on the organization of microsocial interaction. Adaptation is linked to an analysis of the factors of a particular environment or surroundings. Assessing the personal qualities of the people around one as an attractive factor is, in most cases, the key to effective psychic adaptation, whereas assessing those same qualities as a negative factor is associated with disturbances of adaptation.

If it is impossible to change the situation that gives rise to tension, and the person must adapt to it, various techniques can be used:

• • intense muscular exertion;
• • logical reappraisal of the significance of the socially tense situation;
• • communicating with close ones;
• • "accelerating the flow of time";
• • autogenic training;
• • psychotherapy.

To neutralize the physiologically active substances circulating in the blood (stress hormones), which cause corresponding autonomic and psychosomatic reactions of the body, intense muscular exertion is necessary.

Communicating with close ones is an excellent way to relieve tension, thanks to the opportunity to "let off steam," "pour out one's soul," "have a good cry on someone's shoulder," jointly discuss possible effective actions going forward, and switch to another, more interesting topic.

"Accelerating the flow of time" is the use of time's property of being the most powerful calming factor — "time heals" (though, admittedly, only for those who want to be healed). To accelerate the flow of time means to detach oneself from tormenting thoughts by engaging in favorite activities and hobbies, and communicating intensively with positive people.

Autogenic training is a special technique of self-suggestion against a background of maximal muscular relaxation. Amid self-relaxation and self-calming, self-suggestion is carried out by the subject using texts (statements) that promote psychological well-being.

Psychotherapy is turning for help to qualified psychologists and psychotherapists.

To optimize the emotional state, psychologists offer various methods: neuromuscular relaxation techniques, breathing exercises (techniques for regulating breathing to reduce excessive stress), self-suggestion techniques, autogenic training (AT), meditation, yoga, and others, which are covered in sufficient detail in the relevant literature.

Logical reappraisal of the significance of a socially tense situation is important for neutralizing the impulses of the brain that sustain the activity of the focus of excitation (the dominant). In the most general form, it can be presented in the following rules for maintaining peace of mind:

• 1. There are no situations from which a more or less acceptable way out cannot be found. This rule requires a person to form within themselves an inner disposition toward precisely this kind of behavior and to make predominant use of rational mechanisms for regulating behavior.
• 2. Think the situation through, reduce the level of its significance, change your attitude toward the stress-inducing event. For this purpose, the following simple techniques of self-calming are applied:
  • • "at least" — extracting a benefit, something positive, even from a failure, for example: "So I missed the last bus, but at least I'll get some fresh air and take a walk...";
  • • "it could have been worse" — comparing one's own misfortunes with someone else's, even greater grief ("someone else has it much worse");
  • • "sour grapes" — like the fox in Ivan Krylov's fable, saying: "What I was just striving for unsuccessfully wasn't as good as it seemed, and so I don't need it anyway."
• 3. Do not burn today's energy on distress over a past or anticipated misfortune.

• 4. Know your temperament and learn to manage it in order to cope with emotional pain.
• 5. Do not put your personal feelings on display, but do not remain alone with grief for long either — do not shut yourself off in your misfortune. Try to find comfort by turning to art, and call on your sense of humor for help.
• 6. If you are reserved and find it hard to reveal your state even to those close to you, describe everything that happened to a pet, write it down on paper, and then burn it.
• 7. Approach people with kindness and a wish to help. Remember: evil begets evil, aggression begets aggression, and good begets good. People who are sensitive, attentive, and who bring joy, kindness, and consideration are happier, more fortunate, and more psychologically protected. Aggressive people destroy their own psychological security, become more vulnerable, lose their equilibrium, and ultimately end up worse off.
• 8. Fight to the end; do not lose hope of success.
• 9. Reduce the personal significance of the situation. Do not rush to blame yourself for this or that failure. Try to find a justification for your actions, so to speak diminish the failure, compensate for it — this usually softens the consequences and explains what happened.
• 10. Notice and take note even of your barely noticeable successes. After all, they are the result of your actions, your behavior. Success gives you wings and instills confidence. Find the good sides in your life without losing the opportunity to derive joy and pleasure from them. Strengthen your self-confidence, trust your own strengths and abilities. A person's strength lies in joy, not in grief.
• 11. Learn to extract psychological benefit from the situation that has arisen, however difficult it may be for you. Try to evaluate the situation from different perspectives. This will help you change your attitude toward the problems that have arisen and increase your psychological security.
• 12. Be able to distract yourself for a while. It is useful to forget about difficulties and problems for a time, to switch your attention to other kinds of activity, rest, and communication with friends.

• 13. Do not place excessive demands on yourself or on those around you. Do not live with the conviction that you are worse than others. Do not envy others' successes; accept them as natural and with joy. Accept people as they are. Try to see as many merits as possible in people, and do not show irritation toward those around you.
• 14. Do not rush events, and if circumstances prove stronger than you, do not turn them into a tragedy. Remember that everything has its beginning and its end. Failures, suffering, enmity, and hatred are transient in nature. But do not drag out your negative experiences either — this can lead to mental and physical illness.
• 15. Constantly take care of your health: it is easier to keep a healthy spirit in a healthy body. But do not forget about the health of your spirit either — an immense force, both creative and destructive, that governs the body. Take care of moral, psychological, physical, and physiological cleanliness and tidiness.

The rules proposed here are not meant as a standard prescription for every occasion in life. Only through their situationally appropriate, creative application is it possible to overcome emotional tension.

Conclusions

• • Social tension is an acute opposition of personal and intergroup interests. Situations of social tension can occur at the macro, meso, and micro levels.
• • Under conditions of social tension, the so-called anxiety series is characterized by the following parameters: a sense of inner tension, actual fear itself, a sense of the inevitability of an approaching catastrophe, and anxious, fearful agitation.
• • Stress is emotional tension that impairs the course of a person's life activity, reduces their work capacity, and reduces their reliability at work. Stages in the development of stress: alarm, resistance, exhaustion.

• • The degree of stressfulness of a person's reactions depends not only on the strength and duration of the external action of the stressor, but also on the individual characteristics of the person, the strength of their nervous system, past experience, degree of training, and so on.
• • Psychological defense is a specific reaction of the organism, representing a special regulatory system for stabilizing the personality, aimed at eliminating or minimizing the feeling of psychological discomfort.
• • Mechanisms of psychological defense: hypercompensation, substitution, workaholism, high volitional activity, repression, denial, displacement, fixation, intellectualization, projection, rationalization, somatization, flight into illness, fantasy, suppression, blocking, isolation, regression, conversion, identification. Mechanisms for discharging emotional tension manifest themselves in the following forms: alcoholism, substance abuse, drug addiction, external aggression, auto-aggression, and suicide.
• • If it is impossible to change the situation giving rise to tension, and a person must adapt to it, various techniques can be used for this: intense muscular exertion, logical reappraisal of the significance of the socially tense situation, communicating with close ones, "accelerating the flow of time," autogenic training, psychotherapy.

Discussion Questions

• 1. Define the concept of "social tension."
• 2. Explain the main sources of social tension.
• 3. What is the content of the concept of "stress"? Name its types.
• 4. Describe the psychological state of a person's personality under conditions of social tension.
• 5. Explain the content of the mechanisms of psychological defense based on conscious attempts to cope independently with a difficult situation.

• 6. What is the essence of the mechanisms of psychological defense that operate automatically?
• 7. Describe the features of the mechanisms of psychological defense based on passive, manipulative behavior.
• 8. What characterizes the mechanisms of psychological defense based on refusal to productively resolve the situation?
• 9. What is the essence of the mechanisms of psychological defense based on the discharge of emotional tension?
• 10. Describe the content of the two types of interrelated adaptive mechanisms: the allopsychic and the intrapsychic.
• 11. What is the meaning of the main techniques of an individual's adaptive abilities?
• 12. What rules for maintaining peace of mind do you know and use in your own life?