Let's begin now our discussion of how we might actually manage stress in our lives. But first, let's take a look at a model of stress management. As we look at these potential stressors in our lives, they tend to fit in one or four categories. Anticipatory stresses. We can actually imagine things that are going to happen that could be negative that will cause us anxiety and develop physiological and emotional responses much as a real stressful situation might. There can be encounter stressors typically refer to those that are result of interactions with other people. Time stressors, almost all of those have experience the pressures of having work overload and too many things to do and not enough time to do it. Situational stressors are result to the environment they could be work conditions or other factors Related to the environment that can cause you stress. So given that most stressors following to these categories. How might we response on to those? We are already talk a little bit about potential reactions and defense mechanisms. But your response can be both physiological and psychological. We talked about experience anxiety, heart rate, perspiration. And some potential long-term effects leading to illness and sickness, that can be result of sustained stress. With this picture in mind, let's now devote some attention to how we might build resiliency that will moderate the effects of those stressors on us both physically and psychologically. This resiliency can be physical. We want to develop ways of improving our conditioning so that our physical response can be managed and controlled. We want to devote some attention to how we built psychological, and social resiliency so that in our interactions with others we develop the right tools for coping. These together then will form the basis for the stress management strategies that we may choose to employ. Now, let's take a quick look at those These tend to fall into three broad categories. Enactive, proactive, and reactive strategies. We're going to take a little bit more focus look at these now. As we look at enactive strategies, this really is an approach where you remove the stressor from your life entirely. This is not always possible but it does have certain advantages over the other approaches. As we look at proactive strategies, here, we're talking about developing resiliency. So things like physical conditioning would fall into a proactive strategy. It's something that you do over a long period of time to have longer term benefits. Reactive strategies are going to be those that you cope with right now. What things can you do right now to deal with the stress in a particular situation. So these we call coping mechanisms. What are the effects of these? Well, as I mentioned in the enactive strategy by removing the stressor from your life that tends to be a more permanent solution. The proactive strategies I mentioned physical conditioning this tend to be longer term strategies for coping with stress. Reactive ones obviously in the very short term right now. As we look at time frame for doing this, enactive strategies may take a long time to actually put in place. It may take time to remove that particular stressor from your life. Proactive strategies, moderate time frames and the reactive ones tend to be very immediate. An effective overall approach to managing stress will employ a mixture of these strategies, no one strategy alone is going to work in order to be effective you're going to have to employ them all. So think about the inactive strategies of removing stresses the proactive ones of building resilience both and physical and emotional terms. And then, what are those short-term coping mechanisms that you can put in place now to help you deal with those immediate short-term reactive situations?
