Stress Management Skills

Stress Management Skills

Understanding Stress

“It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.”
- Hans Selye

Time Magazine (June, 1983) called stress “The Epidemic of the Eighties,” and regarded
it as the leading health problem. There can be little doubt that the situation has
progressively worsened since then. Contemporary stress tends to be even more
pervasive, persistent and insidious. Recent statistics reveal that:

• Stress is now the number one reason behind sickness from work.” (Gee
Publishing Survey)
• “More than two-thirds of people are suffering from work related stress.” (ICM
Research)
• “Stress in the workplace is undermining performance and productivity in 9 out
of 10 organizations.” (Industrial Society)
Stress is defined as the emotional and physical strain caused by a person’s response
to pressure from the outside world. It occurs when there is a mismatch between what
the people aspire to do what they are capable of doing. In other words, stress results
when the pressure to perform a certain task is greater than the resources available to
perform it.

S = P > R
[S - Stress; P-Pressure; R- Resource]

Stress is not altogether a modern phenomenon. Stress has been of concern in the
medical profession since the days of Hippocrates. Walter Cannon, a physiologist at
Harvard, however, formalized the modern notion of stress, at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Cannon described the “flight or fight response”, a heightened arousal
state that prepares an organism to deal with threats. When under threat, one’s body
releases a rush of adrenaline in order to allow a ‘fight or flight’ response (i.e. to give

the push one needs to fight the threat or to run away from it).