What are the four steps of stress management?

The four steps of stress management that are currently widely used in corporate EAP services and clinical psychological intervention fields are to detect stress triggers, assess the controllability of events, target and match intervention actions, and review and calibrate response methods afterwards.

To be honest, I have been a corporate EAP consultant for three years, and I have seen too many people holding stress-relieving toys and hoarding a bunch of aromatherapy just to reduce stress. In the end, they spent a lot of money and were not less anxious. The essence is that they did not understand the logic of stress management and disease treatment. You cannot just use medicine blindly, you must first understand the root cause of the disease.

Take the young girl who worked in an operation position at an e-commerce company last month. Before Double 11, she had 10 short video outputs, three live broadcast follow-ups, and a lot of talent matching work. As soon as mid-October, she started to suffer from headaches and insomnia every day. She drank milk tea and stayed up late to watch TV series to relieve stress. She gained 5 pounds in half a month, and her KPIs were still missing. When she came to me crying, I took her through these four steps.

The first step of awareness sounds simple, but in fact many people can't do it. Most people just say "I'm so stressed" when they feel uncomfortable. They don't know clearly whether the pressure is caused by too much work to finish, or the anxiety of being scolded by the boss for not doing well, or the peer pressure of seeing colleagues being embarrassed to leave, or even just the irritability caused by low blood sugar caused by not sleeping well at noon. Oh, yes, there is also controversy over the naming of this step in the academic community. Some scholars who focus on physiological intervention believe that it should be called "stress signal tracing". It is necessary to first capture the physiological signals that appear earlier than emotions, such as tight shoulders and neck, and rapid heartbeat. This is more accurate than simply thinking "Why am I anxious?" In fact, the core logic has not changed, that is, don't blindly package all negative feelings into "stress."

After figuring out the source of the trigger, the next step was to evaluate the controllability. At that time, I asked the little girl to list all the tasks she was doing on the whiteboard, and after breaking them down to the smallest granularity, I discovered that 3 of the 10 short videos were last year's hit materials that could be refurbished, and 2 were submissions from experts who only needed to go through the review process. There were only 5 that really required her to do it from scratch. Before, she panicked when she saw the number of 10 tasks and didn't dare to dismantle them. There are also different voices here. Many lecturers in business management will think that this step is a waste of time. If you have time to think about it, you can accomplish several things. However, our case statistics show that completing the controllability assessment can help people dispel at least 60% of their catastrophic imagination. After all, there are really completely uncontrollable things such as sudden layoffs in the company and changes in industry policies. It is useless no matter how urgent you are. It is better to focus all your energy on the parts that can be grasped.

Once the assessment is done, it will be easy to handle. Just target and match the intervention actions. Don’t worry about the “optimal decompression method” that is so popular on the Internet. Only the one that suits you will be useful. That little girl has a character that can't sit still. If I ask her to meditate for 10 minutes every day, she will probably start thinking about how much work she has not done during those 5 minutes, which will make her even more anxious. I will ask her to go to the corridor and jump jumping jacks for 3 minutes every 40 minutes of work. The wind blows for two minutes, which can not only move the shoulders and neck that have been stiff for a long time, but also relax the tension in the brain for a few seconds. If you are stuck in a creative position and feel the pressure, it is better to watch 10 minutes of cat videos. Don’t just sit at your desk and not come up with any good ideas until you get off work.

Just wait until the busy period is over and go back to review and calibrate. The little girl talked to me after the Double 11. She said that after splitting the tasks in advance, she found that as long as she went over the tasks in hand three days in advance, she would not panic at the node. Now she has applied to the leader to fix the review time of expert contributions on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She does not have to interrupt the work at hand when news pops up at any time, which is equivalent to fundamentally reducing the probability of triggering similar pressures in the future. Of course, some people think that this step is unnecessary. The pressure will be over when it is over. If you review the project, you will find trouble for yourself. But once you accumulate experience two or three times, you will know that next time you encounter a large project of the same type, you will not be as emotional as you were the first time. The threshold for coping with pressure will be higher and higher.

To put it bluntly, the essence of these four steps is to prevent you from being carried away by the emotion of stress. Just treat it as an ordinary problem that comes to your door to be solved. It is not a savage beast that wants to swallow you. Take it step by step. Most of the time, what you are afraid of is not the stress itself at all, but the feeling of losing control of "I don't know what to do."