Relaxation Techniques

Building Relaxation Techniques Into Your Life

In our Relaxation techniques section, we look at a range of useful relaxation techniques. These are Imagery, Meditation, Self-hypnosis and use of relaxation tapes.



A similar approach is also to use downloadable self-hypnosis MP3s. These are calming soundtracks that give you a short period of intense relaxation. Hypnosis Downloads produce a number of these: A Healthy Rest, The Four Seasons, A Warm Place, and The Island, all of which we recommend strongly. These are particularly useful in that you do not have to concentrate while using them - this makes them very easy to use when you are run down and tired.



Just as relaxation techniques are useful for managing immediate points of stress, they are also help with managing long term stress. They do this by helping you calm down, resting you and reducing the levels of stress hormones in your body.



You may find it useful to spend a few minutes using relaxation techniques during or at the end of your day: A good way of making sure you do this is to make relaxation a regular part of your daily routine.

Other Ways of Relaxing

Other Ways of Relaxing

There are many other ways of relaxing, and different approaches suit different people. Stores like www.StressLess.com have a wide range of products that can help relieve stress. Health spas offer many treatments targeted at relaxation. Time spent with friends and family can be very satisfying. And there are many forms of entertainment that you can enjoy, and sports and hobbies that you can participate in.



When you are stressed, remember to give yourself "treats". Do the things you enjoy and see the people you like. Where your life is full of unpleasant and stressful events, you can restore some balance to it by doing these things. Spend as much time as you need to find the things that help you relax, and ensure that you make enough time available to do these things.



This is not self-indulgent: It is an important part of keeping yourself functioning effectively and avoiding the problems of burnout, anxiety and depression that come with intense, sustained stress.

Yoga

Yoga - An important physical relaxation technique
Relaxation Techniques from Mind Tools

by Kellie Fowler

Many people turn to yoga for simple reasons, perhaps they just enjoy it, perhaps they find it relieves stress, maybe yoga helps them to better cope with life’s ups and downs, or perhaps it's because a physician has prescribed it. Regardless of the reason for participating in yoga, the result is almost always a more fulfilled life.


If you have tried yoga, you already know that it can help you achieve your goals with a clearer head, a more in-tune body and a renewed spirit.



In this article, we will take a look at the many benefits of yoga but we must caution that no physical fitness program should be taken on without the knowledge and consent of your personal physician.


Before we discuss the benefits of yoga, we should also point out that the body is actually an energy system with close interplay between breathing, heart beat and brain function. Yoga provides a useful maintenance service for this system.


Working from the premise that “Life is breath, breath is life,” yoga places great emphasis on making the breathing deep, rhythmic and effective. The principle here is that essential thoughts and messages are delivered more effectively when the body is relaxed and the brain is well-oxygenated, helping the body and mind to work more successfully while feeling less tired and less stressed.


Yoga breathing (as we see in a later article in this newsletter) lowers blood pressure and brings intense relaxation. Of course, shallow breathing does not always cause unclear thinking or low spirits, but it has been medically linked with attacks of depression, mood swings and other various disorders.


Furthermore, improved appearance through better posture, muscle and skin-tone, follows the dedicated practice of yoga. Bones are strengthened and joints become more flexible. And, it can be amazing to see how much more flexible the body is and how much more positive one’s outlook becomes with just a few month’s of yoga practice.


If you are unable to locate a reputable yoga studio in your area, you may benefit from purchasing a DVD or video that allows you to practice yoga in your home. Keep in mind, many of these can be checked-out at your local library or even previewed over the Internet before purchasing.


An alternative approach is to use the streamed video yoga exercises provided by the Yoga Learning Center. These videos are unbeatable for soothing tense and aching muscles, and helping participants relax deeply with proven stress relieving yoga techniques. Their programs (many of which are at an introductory level) include yoga poses and stretches that will help revitalize your mind and body and refresh your spirit.

Relaxation Response

Relaxation & The Relaxation Response
Relaxation Techniques from Mind Tools

by Kellie Fowler


Multitasking has become a part of our everyday lives. At any given time, most of us are actively working on, or overseeing, a handful of projects and problems all at once, making it nearly impossible to slow down and relax.


Years ago, when I first embarked on a journalism career and subsequently found myself in a bustling newsroom working amongst some of the most experienced writers for a very large, reputable newspaper, I was overwhelmed. As the youngest and one of only two females, I found that the only way I could earn the respect of those around me was to show up first, leave last and give 110% all day long, even when my work days lasted 16 hours! Talk about being on the fast track – the fast track to burnout, that is!


Needless to say, it took just a few short months to realize that the pace I had set for myself was unrealistic. Sure, I was playing in the big leagues and making a great name for myself, but if I wound up too tired to perform, which was inevitable, I would surely make costly mistakes and quickly place myself out of work.


Considering this one weekend, I turned to the local library (I am embarrassed to say that this was before the days of the World Wide Web) to find sources on relaxation. I knew I had to work in some relaxation if I wanted to continue meeting tight deadlines each day with copy that was strong and print-worthy. So, I spent hours at the library that day and left with seven books. To this day, I continue to rely on the information I found in one book, and would like to share this with you.


It was a book called “The Relaxation Response,” by Dr. Herbert Benson, that changed my life and taught me the importance of relaxing each day, and even showed me exactly how to do it.


Based on studies at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Benson’s quick and easy relaxation techniques have immense physical benefits, from lowering blood pressure to a reduction in heart disease. The book explains how anyone can benefit from learning and perfecting relaxation techniques. In doing so, Dr. Benson created a book that is relied on by healthcare professionals and authorities to treat the negative effects of stress.


By learning to invoke the relaxation response once or twice a day for just ten minutes at a sitting, one can effectively lower blood pressure and gain tranquility in their emotional life, making them more successful both in the workplace and at home.



Try the following 6-step relaxation response the next time you feel anxiety or stress:

1. Sit quietly in a comfortable position.
2. Close your eyes.
3. Deeply relax all of your muscles, beginning at your feet and progressing up to your face. Keep your muscles relaxed.
4. Breathe through your nose. Become aware of your breathing. As you breathe out (exhale), say the word, “ONE”, silently to yourself. For example: breathe IN…OUT, “ONE”, -IN…OUT, “ONE”, etc. Breathe easily and naturally.
5. Continue for 10 to 20 minutes (depending on your schedule). You may open your eyes to check the time, but do not use an alarm. When you finish, sit quietly for several minutes, at first with your eyes closed, then with your eyes opened. Do not stand up for a few minutes.
6. Do not worry about if you are successful in achieving a deep state of relaxation. When distracted, simply return to repeating “ONE.”

Besides relying on this technique a few times each day, I regularly use it to get to sleep at night, especially after a long, hard day or before a tough next day. It’s simple, I can fit it in to my workdays when needed, is fast, reliable and most importantly, it works!

Identify Burnout

Identifying Burnout Pressure Points

As we have already discussed, part of the cause of burnout lies with your situation. The other part comes from within yourself: From your ideals, your ambitions and your goals.


This simple tool gives you the opportunity to think about what you want to get out of your job, and then to compare this with the reality of your situation. This helps you to identify possible areas of mismatch, as these mismatches are possible pressure points that may develop into burnout. Knowing these pressure points helps you to manage the situation to avoid burnout.


Using the Tool:
To start using this tool, list the things that give real meaning to what you do.


Write down what attracted you to your current job or profession in the first place. List the things about it that you find fulfilling now. Include the value of the profession to humanity and what excites you about it. Think about what you want to achieve within it, and what you think is important to doing the job well.


This will give you a long list of things that are good about what you do. From this list, identify the five things that give the greatest meaning to your work. These should be the things about the job that most inspire you. Write these down in order with the most important item at the top of the list. This list shows you the things that you should protect as much as you can.


Next, write down the things that frustrate you most about your work. This may involve things like inadequacy of resource, lack of recognition, or bureaucracy. As well as this, list the factors that are causing you difficulty and which are likely to cause stress in the future.


Now work through the list of things that give you meaning item-by-item. For each item, look at the list of frustrations. Where these threaten the things that are most importnat to you, note these down: These are particular pressure points that you need to monitor.


Think these through carefully, and plan in advance how you will handle build-ups of stress in these areas. Our article on avoiding burnout can help you to do this.


Summary:
You are most vulnerable to burnout when the stresses you experience impact negatively on the things that you find most fulfilling in your job. Not only do you experience the unpleasantness of stress, you lose the job satisfaction that counter-balances this.


This simple tool helps you to identify the things that give meaning to the work you do. It then helps you to understand where the stresses that you experience undermine these. These are often the stresses that are most likely to cause you burnout.


As well as this, by understanding what gives meaning to your work, you know how to steer the development of your job to give yourself the greatest job satisfaction.

Avoiding Burnout

Avoiding Burnout

So far, we have looked at identifying your personal burnout pressure points and have shown how you can check yourself for burnout.


This section shows you some of the practical steps that you can take if you are at risk of burning out. We have already looked at many of these in detail in previous sections. This section acts as a reminder of these important skills.

Understanding Where Pressure Comes From
Before you can take action to counter burnout, you need to understand why you are at danger of it. The tools in our Pin-Pointing Stress section can help you in this.


If you need more help in identifying the most important sources of stress in your life, then use the Schedule of Recent Experience to get a view of the long term stress you are experiencing, and keep a Stress Diary to see what is causing stress in your day-to-day life.


Too much to do, too little time…
Where excessive workload is the problem, then three major groups of tools may help: First, look at the tools in our Work Overload section. Use the Job Analysis tool to see if you can cut away low-yield work. Review your management of time to use this to its full, and delegate tasks to other people where you can.



Second, consider whether you are being too accommodating. Should you let people know that you have too much work to do? Should you be politely turning down new work that people pass you? If this is the case, then improved assertiveness skills may help you to do this in a positive way. Remember that you will have to say “no” at some stage, otherwise your commitments will get bigger and bigger. You must learn to say no to commitments that you should not take on, otherwise you will be in severe danger of becoming intensely stressed and exhausted.



An obvious point is to check that you are using all of the resources available to you. Included within this, make sure that you are using your support network as fully as you can and that you are getting the help you need when you need it.



Finally, be aware that it is just not possible to do some jobs. Sometimes organizations commit themselves to projects that they do not have the capabilities, resources or skills to complete. These quickly become “projects from Hell”. Beware of these projects - they can be traps from which it is difficult to escape, even if you are at severe risk of burning out.



Political and people problems
Where politics seems to be a problem, you need to check that you are allocating enough time to managing your stakeholders and that you are correctly managing your support network. It is very easy when under stress to stop communicating with people, and this can lead to political problems that compound with other issues to create a toxic cocktail of stress.



Alternatively, a major cause of burnout can happen when too many people lean too heavily upon you. While it is important to provide support to the people around you, some people will suck up as much support as you can give and demand still more. This can be both tiresome and intensely disappointing, as you never seem to be able to meet their needs.



While distancing yourself from people is a symptom of burnout, it is also a defense against it. You need to find the fine balance between being reasonably open and available to the people you live and work with, while at the same time distancing yourself from people who drain you of emotional energy. A way of doing this may be to involve other people in providing support.



Another area where you need to find a balance is with the different (and often conflicting) demands of different groups of people and organizations. An obvious conflict is between work and family: Both really want as much of your time and energy as possible. You need to find a way of reconciling both, while still leaving time for yourself. However, this is also true of almost all of the people or organizations you deal with. All have their own goals and values, and all have their own ideas of how you should behave. In many cases, these goals will conflict with those of other organizations and in many cases they will conflict with yours.



As the only person who is an expert in your own life, you need to find what seems like a reasonable balance and then defend this assertively.



Avoiding Exhaustion
In the introduction to this section, we saw how exhaustion was such a major factor in burnout. Elsewhere on this site, we look at the importance of sleep and rest in detail.



Going on a good, long vacation is one of the best ways of avoiding burnout. Choose a vacation that does not expose you to the stresses you experience at home or which distracts you from them. Leave your laptop and mobile phone behind. Forget about work completely until your return. Rest, and enjoy life. Being a workaholic is not something to be proud of.



Similarly, make sure you get enough sleep and rest, and that you frequently use relaxation techniques to calm down and relax.



Protecting the Meaning of Your Job
The other major cause of burnout is disillusionment with your job, particularly when you get a great deal of the meaning in your life from the work you do.



The emphasis here is on protecting the parts of your job that give you meaning and satisfaction. If you have trouble in justifying this to yourself, then think about the people you serve: if you burn out, then they will not get the benefit of the energy and enthusiasm you can provide: You owe it to them to enjoy your job!



It is possible also that the job itself is badly designed and that contradictions inherent within it are causing much of the stress you are experiencing. Use our Job Analysis tool to check this out. Alternatively, if frustration with lack of career development is the problem, use our Career Planning tool.


Summary:
There is a lot that you can do to avoid job burnout. Perhaps the most important thing is to recognize that you are at risk, and take this seriously.



This article briefly shows you the sort of things you can do to avoid burnout. These mainly focus on managing workload, dealing with people problems, avoiding exhaustion and protecting the meaning of your work. If you can do these things, then you should be able to avoid burnout and continue to get satisfaction from the work you do.

Recove Burnout

Recovering From Burnout

It may be too late to talk about avoiding burnout. Maybe you've already reached the stage where you are thoroughly disillusioned with your job and where you no longer get anything of emotional value from it. You may feel let down or betrayed by your organization, and may be "going through the motions" just for the money your job brings in.


While you can deal with exhaustion by taking a good break, rest may not cure this sense of disillusionment. The passion and commitment that you previously brought to your job may now have completely burned out. Without this, your career may not progress much further.


People deal with this situation in a number of different ways. Some are effective, while others are not so good:

* Doing Nothing: Often, one of the worst ways of dealing with burnout is to accept it and do nothing about it. By remaining in place, you risk becoming bitter and angry as opportunities pass you by. Your organization may come to regard you as “dead wood” and if things do not change, you may be doomed to a gradual or sudden decline. You need to change the situation in some way.
* Changing Career: If you have lost all interest in the values that led you into your profession in the first place, then career change may be the best option open to you.

The first downside of this, however, is that you lose the benefit of the precious experience you have already gained within the profession. In entering a new profession, you will be competing equally with people much younger than you, and these people may be willing to accept much lower salaries.

A second downside is that you risk a strong sense of failure in the way you handled things, whereas burnout will only have been a temporary setback if you succeed in turning the situation around.
* Changing Jobs: Job change within the same profession is usually less of an issue than full-scale career change, in that many of your skills and much of your experience will be transferrable. Job change gives you the opportunity to rededicate yourself to your original goals. It also provides a fresh start in a new environment, without the painful reminders that come with staying in the same job.

Changing jobs is an appropriate response where you are disillusioned with your organization more than you are with your career. What you risk, however, is ending up in the same situation again: In changing your job, you must make sure that you understand what lead you to burn out, and ensure that history does not repeat itself. Looking at this positively, you should know what to look for, and have a good idea of how to avoid it!
* Using Burnout as a Trigger for Personal Growth: This is probably one the most positive ways that people manage burnout: By using it as a wakeup call to re-evaluate the way they want to live their lives and what they want to achieve. We look at this in more detail below.

Using Burnout as a Trigger for Personal Growth:

Understanding Why You Burned Out
An important first step in managing burnout is to deal with the sense of failure that you may experience following it. A starting point for this is to take a long, rational, dispassionate look at the circumstances leading up to it.



A good way of doing this is by talking to someone who you trust and who is experienced in similar situations in similar organizations (you may find a personal coach helpful here). Avoid people within your own organization, as these people will be tainted with its assumptions and thinking habits: These may contribute to the problem. Take the time to talk the situation through in detail, looking at the circumstances before your involvement, your workload, your actions and the actions of other people, and the situations that evolved.


If you are the sort of person who has been committed enough to your work to burn out, it is more than likely that you will have already done everything in your power to resolve the situation.


In reflecting, you will probably find that you made some mistakes, but you will most likely see that these are excusable under the circumstances. You will almost certainly see that a great deal of blame should be attributed externally to the situation, to people around you, or to the people who set up the situation in the first place. In your mind, make sure you place this blame where it fairly belongs.


Lessons that people typically learn through this process are that they are not superhuman, that hard work does not cure all ills, and that major achievements need the commitment and support of other people: In many circumstances, the intense commitment of only one person simply is not enough. They also learn to look at situations with skepticism as they go into them, and to trust their own judgment in spotting and communicating problems early on.


Learn the lessons of your mistakes so that you do not repeat them.


Moving On… Finding New Direction
Having come to terms with the situation, the next step is to re-evaluate your goals and think about what you want to achieve with your life. We touch on this briefly in our Avoiding Burnout article; however in recovering from burnout, it is worth doing this in detail.


Articles on the Mind Tools main site guide you through the processes of thinking about what you want to achieve with your life and of reviewing and setting life goals.


Inform these processes with the increased wisdom and self-understanding you will have gained by understanding why you burned out. Ensure that you give due weight to the relaxation, quality of life issues and social activities that will help to protect you against burnout in the future. Make sure that your goals are set in a balanced manner so that they do not conflict with one-another, and that they are not so challenging that they become a source of excessive stress in their own right.


Next, use SWOT Analysis to more fully understand your current position with respect to these goals. Use it to identify where you need to develop new skills and capabilities, and to understand where you need the help of other people.


Make an Action Plan for achieving these goals and start work on it. While part of this Action Plan may include changing job or career, you will be doing this as part of an active plan for the future, not as an escape from one job into another one that is equally bad.


As well as taking these active steps to put burnout behind you, make sure that you adopt the steps towards a healthy lifestyle we looked at in our Defenses Against Stress section. These will help you to avoid exhaustion and long-term stress in the future.

What Stress Is....

What Stress Is... Definitions

This is a dangerous topic!


There have been many different definitions of what stress is, whether used by psychologists, medics, management consultants or others. There seems to have been something approaching open warfare between competing definitions: Views have been passionately held and aggressively defended.


What complicates this is that intuitively we all feel that we know what stress is, as it is something we have all experienced. A definition should therefore be obvious…except that it is not.


Problems of Definition

One problem with a single definition is that stress is made up of many things: It is a family of related experiences, pathways, responses and outcomes caused by a range of different events or circumstances. Different people experience different aspects and identify with different definitions.


Hans Selye (one of the founding fathers of stress research) identified another part of this problem when he saw that different types of definition operate in different areas of knowledge. To a lawyer or a linguist, words have very precise, definite and fixed meanings. In other fields, ideas and definitions continue evolving as research and knowledge expands.


Selye’s view in 1956 was that “stress is not necessarily something bad – it all depends on how you take it. The stress of exhilarating, creative successful work is beneficial, while that of failure, humiliation or infection is detrimental.” Selye believed that the biochemical effects of stress would be experienced irrespective of whether the situation was positive or negative.


Since then, ideas have moved on. In particular, the harmful biochemical and long-term effects of stress have rarely been observed in positive situations.


The current consensus

Now, the most commonly accepted definition of stress (mainly attributed to Richard S Lazarus) is that stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.


People feel little stress when they have the time, experience and resources to manage a situation. They feel great stress when they think they can't handle the demands put upon them. Stress is therefore a negative experience. And it is not an inevitable consequence of an event: It depends a lot on people's perceptions of a situation and their real ability to cope with it.



This is the main definition used by this site, although we also recognize that there is an intertwined instinctive stress response to unexpected events. The stress response inside us is therefore part instinct and part to do with the way we think.

Stress & Your Healt

Stress and Your Health

We've already looked at the survival benefits of the fight-or-flight response, as well as the problems this caused for our performance in work-related situations. We've also seen the negative “burnout” effect of exposure to long-term stress. These effects can also affect your health – either with direct physiological damage to your body, or with harmful behavioral effects.


The behavioral effects of stress

The behavioral effects of an over-stressed lifestyle are easy to explain. When under pressure, some people are more likely to drink heavily or smoke, as a way of getting immediate chemical relief from stress.


Others may have so much work to do that they do not exercise or eat properly. They may cut down on sleep, or may worry so much that they sleep badly. They may get so carried away with work and meeting daily pressures that they do not take time to see the doctor or dentist when they need to. All of these are likely to harm health.


The direct physiological effects of excessive stress are more complex. In some areas they are well understood, while in other areas, they are still subject to debate and further research.


Stress and heart disease

The link between stress and heart disease is well-established. If stress is intense, and stress hormones are not ‘used up’ by physical activity, our raised heart rate and high blood pressure put tension on arteries and cause damage to them. As the body heals this damage, artery walls scar and thicken, which can reduce the supply of blood and oxygen to the heart.


This is where a fight-or-flight response can become lethal: Stress hormones accelerate the heart to increase the blood supply to muscles; however, blood vessels in the heart may have become so narrow that not enough blood reaches the heart to meet these demands. This can cause a heart attack.


Other effects of stress

Stress has been also been found to damage the immune system, which explains why we catch more colds when we are stressed. It may intensify symptoms in diseases that have an autoimmune component, such as rheumatoid arthritis. It also seems to affect headaches and irritable bowel syndrome, and there are now suggestions of links between stress and cancer.


Stress is also associated with mental health problems and, in particular, anxiety and depression. Here the relationship is fairly clear: the negative thinking that is associated with stress also contributes to these.


The direct effects of stress in other areas of health are still under debate. In some areas (for example in the formation of stomach ulcers) diseases traditionally associated with stress are now attributed to other causes.


Regular exercise can reduce your physiological reaction to stress. It also strengthens your heart and increases the blood supply to it, directly affecting your vulnerability to heart disease.


Although this site focuses mainly on stress and work performance, many of the tools and techniques within it will help you manage stresses that would otherwise adversely affect your health. However, if you suspect that you are prone to stress-related illness, or if you are in any doubt about the state of your health, you should consult appropriate medical advice immediately. Keep in mind that stress management is only part of any solution to stress-related illness.


Take stress seriously!

What Stress Is ... . .2

What Stress Is - The Underlying Mechanisms...

There are two types of instinctive stress response that are important to how we understand stress and stress management: the short-term “Fight-or-Flight” response and the long-term “General Adaptation Syndrome”. The first is a basic survival instinct, while the second is a long-term effect of exposure to stress.


A third mechanism comes from the way that we think and interpret the situations in which we find ourselves.


Actually, these three mechanisms can be part of the same stress response – we will initially look at them separately, and then show how they can fit together.


“Fight-or-Flight”
Some of the early work on stress (conducted by Walter Cannon in 1932) established the existence of the well-known fight-or-flight response. His work showed that when an animal experiences a shock or perceives a threat, it quickly releases hormones that help it to survive.


These hormones help us to run faster and fight harder. They increase heart rate and blood pressure, delivering more oxygen and blood sugar to power important muscles. They increase sweating in an effort to cool these muscles, and help them stay efficient. They divert blood away from the skin to the core of our bodies, reducing blood loss if we are damaged. And as well as this, these hormones focus our attention on the threat, to the exclusion of everything else. All of this significantly improves our ability to survive life-threatening events.


Power, but little control...

Unfortunately, this mobilization of the body for survival also has negative consequences. In this state, we are excitable, anxious, jumpy and irritable. This reduces our ability to work effectively with other people.


With trembling and a pounding heart, we can find it difficult to execute precise, controlled skills. And the intensity of our focus on survival interferes with our ability to make fine judgments based on drawing information from many sources. We find ourselves more accident-prone and less able to make good decisions.


It is easy to think that this fight-or-flight, or adrenaline, response is only triggered by obviously life-threatening danger. On the contrary, recent research shows that we experience the fight-or-flight response when simply encountering something unexpected.


The situation does not have to be dramatic: People experience this response when frustrated or interrupted, or when they experience a situation that is new or in some way challenging. This hormonal, fight-or-flight response is a normal part of everyday life and a part of everyday stress, although often with an intensity that is so low that we do not notice it.


There are very few situations in modern working life where this response is useful. Most situations benefit from a calm, rational, controlled and socially sensitive approach. Our Relaxation Techniques section explains a range of good techniques for keeping this fight-or-flight response under control.


The General Adaptation Syndrome and Burnout
Hans Selye took a different approach from Cannon. Starting with the observation that different diseases and injuries to the body seemed to cause the same symptoms in patients, he identified a general response (the “General Adaptation Syndrome”) with which the body reacts to a major stimulus. While the Fight-or-Flight response works in the very short term, the General Adaptation Syndrome operates in response to longer-term exposure to causes of stress.


Selye identified that when pushed to extremes, animals reacted in three stages:

1. First, in the Alarm Phase, they reacted to the stressor.
2. Next, in the Resistance Phase, the resistance to the stressor increased as the animal adapted to, and coped with, it. This phase lasted for as long as the animal could support this heightened resistance.
3. Finally, once resistance was exhausted, the animal entered the Exhaustion Phase, and resistance declined substantially.

Selye established this with many hundreds of experiments performed on laboratory rats. However, he also quoted research during World War II with bomber pilots. Once they had completed a few missions over enemy territory, these pilots usually settled down and performed well. After many missions, however, pilot fatigue would set in as they began to show “neurotic manifestations”.


In the business environment, this exhaustion is seen in “burnout”. The classic example comes from the Wall Street trading floor: by most people’s standards, life on a trading floor is stressful. Traders learn to adapt to the daily stressors of making big financial decisions, and of winning and losing large sums of money. In many cases, however, these stresses increase and fatigue starts to set in.


At the same time, as traders become successful and earn more and more money, their financial motivation to succeed can diminish. Ultimately, many traders experience burnout. We look at this in more detail in our section on burnout.

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Stress and the way we think
Particularly in normal working life, much of our stress is subtle and occurs without obvious threat to survival. Most comes from things like work overload, conflicting priorities, inconsistent values, over-challenging deadlines, conflict with co-workers, unpleasant environments and so on. Not only do these reduce our performance as we divert mental effort into handling them, they can also cause a great deal of unhappiness.


We have already mentioned that the most common currently accepted definition of stress is something that is experienced when a person perceives that “demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.”


Stress, a matter of judgment

In becoming stressed, people must therefore make two main judgments: firstly they must feel threatened by the situation, and secondly they must doubt that 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. This sense of threat is rarely physical. It may, for example, involve perceived threats to our social standing, to other people’s opinions of us, to our career prospects or to our own deeply held values.


Just as with real threats to our survival, these perceived threats trigger the hormonal fight-or-flight response, with all of its negative consequences.


Building on this, this site offers a variety of approaches to managing stress. The navigation bar in the left hand column offers a range of practical methods for managing these stresses by tackling them at source. It also offers some powerful tools for changing your interpretation of stressful situations, thereby reducing the perception of threat.


Pulling these mechanisms together – the integrated stress response…
So far, we have presented the Fight-or-Flight response, the General Adaptation Syndrome, and our mental responses to stress as separate mechanisms. In fact, they can fit together into one response.


The key to this is that Hans Selye’s ‘Alarm Phase’ is the same thing as Walter Cannon’s Fight-or-Flight response.


We can therefore see that mental stress triggers the fight-or-flight response, and that if this stress is sustained for a long time, the end result might be exhaustion and burnout.

Stress & Performance

Stress and Your Performance

So far, we have seen that stress is a negative experience. We have seen the short-term negative effects that stress hormones can have on your performance, and have seen how stress can contribute to burnout.


The Positive Effects of Pressure

Sometimes, however, the pressures and demands that may cause stress can be positive in their effect. One example of this is where sportsmen and women flood their bodies with fight-or-flight adrenaline to power an explosive performance. Another example is where deadlines are used to motivate people who seem bored or unmotivated. We will discuss this briefly here, but throughout the rest of this site we see stress as a problem that needs to be solved.


And the Negative...

In most work situations jobs, our stress responses causes our performance to suffer. A calm, rational, controlled and sensitive approach is usually called for in dealing with most difficult problems at work: Our social inter-relationships are just too complex not to be damaged by an aggressive approach, while a passive and withdrawn response to stress means that we can fail to assert our rights when we should.


Before we look further at how to manage stress and our performance, it is important to look at the relationship between pressure and performance in a little more detail, first by looking at the idea of the “Inverted-U”, and second by looking at "Flow". This is the ideal state of concentration and focus that brings excellent performance.


Pressure & Performance – the Inverted U
The relationship between pressure and performance is explained in one of the oldest and most important ideas in stress management, the “Inverted-U” relationship between pressure and performance (see below). The Inverted-U relationship focuses on people’s performance of a task.


The left hand side of the graph is easy to explain for pragmatic reasons. When there is very little pressure on us to carry out an important task, there is little incentive for us to focus energy and attention on it. This is particularly the case when there may be other, more urgent, or more interesting, tasks competing for attention.

As pressure on us increases, we enter the “area of best performance”. Here, we are able to focus on the task and perform well – there is enough pressure on us to focus our attention but not so much that it disrupts our performance.


The right hand side of the graph is more complex to explain.


Negative Thoughts Crowd Our Minds

We are all aware that we have a limited short-term memory: If you try to memorize a long list of items, you will not be able to remember more than six or eight items unless you use formal memory techniques. Similarly, although we have huge processing power in our brains, we cannot be conscious of more than a few thoughts at any one time. In fact, in a very real way, we have a limited “attentional capacity”.


As we become uncomfortably stressed, distractions, difficulties, anxieties and negative thinking begin to crowd our minds. This is particularly the case where we look at our definition of stress, i.e. that it occurs when a person perceives that “demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.” These thoughts compete with performance of the task for our attentional capacity. Concentration suffers, and focus narrows as our brain becomes overloaded.


As shown in the figure, this is something of a slippery slope: the more our brain is overloaded, the more our performance can suffer. The more our performance suffers, the more new distractions, difficulties, anxieties and negative thoughts crowd our minds.


Other research has shown that stress reduces people’s ability to deal with large amounts of information. Both decision-making and creativity are impaired because people are unable to take account of all the information available. This inability accounts for the common observation that highly stressed people will persist in a course of action even when better alternatives are available. It also explains why anxious people perform best when they are put under little additional stress, while calm people may need additional pressure to produce a good performance.


Notes on the research behind the Inverted-U:
While this is an important and useful idea, people’s evaluations of stress and performance are by necessity subjective. This has made it difficult to prove the ‘Inverted-U’ idea formally. Also, for ease of explanation, we show a smooth curve here. In reality, different people have different shaped and positioned inverted-Us at different times and in different circumstances. This is all part of “life’s rich tapestry”.


Entering a State of "Flow"
When you are operating in your “area of best performance”, you are normally able to concentrate, and focus all of your attention on the important task at hand. When you do this without distraction, you often enter what Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Chicago University describes as a state of ‘flow’. This involves “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost".



You perform at your best in this state because you are able to focus all of your efforts, resources and abilities on the tasks at hand. While you are sufficiently motivated to resist competing temptations, you are not so stressed that anxieties and distractions interfere with clear thought.



This is an intensely creative, efficient and satisfying state of mind. It is the state of mind in which, for example, the most persuasive speeches are made, the best software is developed, and the most impressive athletic or artistic performances are delivered.



Helping Yourself to Get Into Flow

One of the frustrations of management is that managers can feel that they lose the ‘right’ to these periods of deep concentration when they must be readily available to others, and be able to deal with the constantly changing information, decisions and activities around them. Studies of good managers show that they rarely get more than a few minutes alone without distraction. This alone can be frustrating, and can contribute strongly to managerial stress.



In jobs where concentration is a rare commodity, there are various solutions to creating the periods of flow that sustain good performance. Solutions include working from home, or setting aside parts of the day as quiet periods. Another solution might be to delegate the activities that require the greatest levels of concentration, allowing the manager to concentrate on problems as they arise, serving to create a flow of its own.



One of the key aims of this site is to help you manage stress so that you can enter this state of flow, and deliver truly excellent performance in your career.

Intro Stress Mgmnt...

Introducing Stress Management...

Our main definition of stress is that stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.

With this in mind, we can now look at how you can manage all of the stresses that your career will bring.


From our definition, you can see that there are three major approaches that we can use to manage stress:

* Action-oriented: In which we seek to confront the problem causing the stress, changing the environment or the situation;
* Emotionally-oriented: In which we do not have the power to change the situation, but we can manage stress by changing our interpretation of the situation and the way we feel about it; and
* Acceptance-oriented: Where something has happened over which we have no power and no emotional control, and where our focus is on surviving the stress.

Action-oriented approaches - best where you have some control

To be able to take an action-oriented approach, we must have some power in the situation. If we do, then action-oriented approaches are some of the most satisfying and rewarding ways of managing stress. These are techniques that we can use to manage and overcome stressful situations, changing them to our advantage.



The early sections on the navigation bar to the left focus on action-oriented coping. These sections introduce skills that help you to manage your job actively, work well with your boss and co-workers, and change your surroundings to eliminate environmental stress. The Action-oriented sections of this site are:

* Cope with the Stress of Work Overload
* Survive the Stress of Problem Jobs
* Deal With Problem People
* Manage Environmental Stress
* Manage Performance Stress
* Avoid Burnout

Emotionally-oriented approaches - subtle but effective

If you do not have the power to change a situation, then you may be able to reduce stress by changing the way you look at it, using an emotionally-oriented approach.


Emotionally-oriented approaches are often less attractive than action-oriented approaches in that the stresses can recur time and again; however, they are useful and effective in their place. The section on Reducing Stress With Rational Thinking explains some useful techniques for getting another perspective on difficult situations.


Acceptance-oriented approaches - when there's no valid alternative...

Sometimes, we have so little power in a situation that all we can do to survive it. This is the case, for example, when loved-ones die.



In these situations, often the first stage of coping with the stress is to accept one’s lack of power. The section on Defenses Against Stress looks at building the buffers against stress that help you through these difficult periods. Arguably, the section on Useful Relaxation Techniques also falls into this category.



These different approaches to stress management address our definition of stress in different ways: the action-oriented techniques help us to manage the demands upon us and increase the resources we can mobilize; the emotionally oriented techniques help us to adjust our perceptions of the situation; and the acceptance-oriented techniques help us survive the situations that we genuinely cannot change.

Ur Stress Diary

Your Stress Diary


Introduction:
Stress Diaries are useful for understanding the causes of short-term stress in your life. They also give you an insight into how you react to stress.


The idea behind Stress Diaries is that on a regular basis you write down how stressed you're feeling, so that you can understand these stresses and then manage them. This is important because often these stresses flit in and out of our minds without getting the attention and focus that they deserve.


As well as helping you capture and understand the most common sources of stress in your life, Stress Diaries help you to understand:

* The causes of stress in more detail; and
* How you react to stress, and whether your reactions are appropriate and useful.

Using the Tool:
Stress Diaries are useful in that they gather information regularly and routinely, over a period of time. This helps you to separate the common, routine stresses from those that only occur occasionally. This helps you understand the pattern of stress in your life.


To use the tool, download and use this Excel template or use this web-based template.


Make regular entries in your Stress Diary (for example, every hour). If you have any difficulty remembering to do this, set an alarm to remind you to make your next diary entry. Also make an entry in your diary after each incident that is stressful enough for you to feel that it is important.


Every time you make an entry, record the following information:

* The date and time of the entry.
* How happy you feel now, on a scale of -10 (the most unhappy you have ever been) to +10 (the happiest you have been). As well as this, write down the mood you are feeling.
* How stressed you feel now, again on a subjective scale of 0 to 10. As before, 0 here would be the most relaxed you have ever been, while 10 would show the greatest stress you have ever experienced.
* The most recent stressful event you have experienced
* The symptom you feel (e.g. “butterflies in your stomach”, anger, headache, raised pulse rate, sweaty palms, etc.)
* The fundamental cause of the stress (being as honest and objective as possible)
* If you're recording an event, how well did you handleit: Did your reaction help solve the problem, or did it inflame it?

You will reap the real benefits of having a stress diary in the first few weeks. After this, the benefit you get will reduce each additional day.


If, however, your lifestyle changes, or you begin to suffer from stress again in the future, then it may be worth using the diary approach again. You will probably find that the stresses you face have changed. If this is the case, then keeping a diary again will help you to develop a different approach to deal with them..


Analyzing the Diary
After two weeks, take the time to look through your diary in detail:

* First, look at the different stresses you experienced. Pick out the stresses you experienced most frequently, and write them out in order.

Next, prepare a second list with the most unpleasant stresses at the top of the list and the least unpleasant at the bottom.

Looking at your lists of stresses, those at the top of each list are the most important for you to learn to control. The stress planning tool helps you plan how to deal with these stresses, and how to identify the techniques that are most effective for managing them.

Working through the stresses, look at their underlying causes, and your appraisal of how well you handled the stressful events. Do these show you areas where you handled stress poorly, and could improve your stress management skills? If so, list these.
* Next, look through your diary at the situations that cause you stress. List these (this site also helps you prepare for these situations so that you can manage stress effectively).
* Finally, look at how you felt when you were under stress. Look at how it affected your happiness and your efficiency, understand how you behaved, and think about how you felt. The section on Reducing Stress with Rational Thinking will show you how to improve your mood and manage your emotions.

Having worked through your diary, you should understand more fully what the most important and frequent sources of stress are in your life. You should appreciate the levels of stress at which you are happiest. And you should also know the sort of situations that cause you stress so that you can prepare for them and manage them well.

You should also have more of an understanding about how you react to stress, and the symptoms that you show when you are stressed. When you experience these symptoms in the future, learn to use appropriate stress management techniques.



The next tool, the Stress Key, helps you identify the stress management techniques that are most appropriate for managing these stresses.



However, remember how dangerous stress can be. Do pay attention to the warning at the foot of this page: If you have any concerns over stress-related illness or are persistently unhappy as a result of stress, you need to see your doctor.


Summary
Stress Diaries help you to get a good understanding of the routine, short-term stresses that you experience in your life. They help you to identify the most important, and most frequent, stresses that you experience, so that you can concentrate your efforts on these. They also help you to identify areas where you need to improve your stress management skills, and help you to understand the levels of stress at which you are happiest, and most efficient.



To keep a stress diary, make an entry on a sheet like the one shown on a regular basis. For example, you may do this every hour. Also make entries after stressful events.



After, say, two weeks, use the diary to identify the most frequent and most serious stresses that you experience. Use it also to identify areas where you can improve your management of stress.

Stress Mgmt Plan

Making A Stress Management Plan

So far in this section, we have looked at the Schedule of Recent Experience, Stress Diaries and Stress SWOT.


In this article, we use the self-knowledge you have gained with these techniques to think about how you can manage stress. By making a stress management plan, you can focus your attention on the most serious sources of stress in your life, so that you can work on bringing these under control.


Introducing Your Stress Management Plan
The diagram below shows the stages of the stress management planning process:

We looked at the first stage of this process in our articles on the Schedule of Recent Experience, Stress Diaries and Stress SWOT. If you have used the tools we discussed, you should already have a good idea of the most important sources of stress in your life.


List and Prioritize the Sources of Stress In Your Life
The next step is to prioritize these sources of stress so that you can separate the important stressors that must be dealt with from the minor, infrequent irritations that do not need as much attention.


Start by writing down a list of the sources of stress that you identified with the Schedule of Recent Experience. To this list, add the most frequent and serious sources of stress you identified with your Stress Diary. Finally, add the weaknesses and threats you identified with Stress SWOT.


Review this consolidated list and redraft it in order with the most important things at the top. The items at the top of the list should be the most important for you to resolve, while the ones at the bottom of the list can wait until you have the time to deal with them.


Tip:
If you create this list using a spreadsheet, it will be much easier to sort the list into the correct order without a lot of tedious redrafting.


Once you have done this, the next step is to think about how to deal with each source of stress.


Work out How to Target Each Source of Stress

A good way of doing this is to work through the most important stressors on your list one-by-one. For each source of stress, work through the Stress Key. This will help you find the techniques that are most relevant.



Also, think about what you learned about yourself when you used Stress SWOT Analysis. As part of this, you may have identified people or resources that can help you in managing stress – co-workers, friends, mentors, team members or many other people, or additional resource. Make sure that you make appropriate use of all of the help, skills and resources that you have access to. Also, make a note of the skills that you need to acquire to manage stress effectively.



And then think through for yourself whether these are the most effective techniques or skills to use, or whether others may be more appropriate.



Bringing This Together: Your Stress Management Plan
Then, based on this, write down what you are going to do to manage each of the important sources of stress that you have identified. This is your Stress Management Plan.



As you create your plan, make sure that you do not over-stretch yourself: The last thing you want is to get stressed-out by failing to meet the timetable of your stress management plan!



Next, make entries into your diary reminding you to review your plan, and keep it fresh in your mind.



With your plan, you should now have a good idea of what you have to do to manage the stress in your life. All you now have to do is implement this plan!

Childhood stress

Childhood stress

Childhood stress can be caused by any situation that requires a person to adapt or change. The situation often produces anxiety. Stress may be caused by positive changes, such as starting a new activity, but it is most commonly linked with negative changes such as illness or death in the family.
Alternative Names

Fear in children; Anxiety in children; Childhood stress
Information

Stress is a response to any situation or factor that creates a negative emotional or physical change or both. People of all ages can experience stress. In small quantities, stress is good -- it can motivate you and help you be more productive. However, excessive stress can interfere with life, activities, and health. Stress can affect the way people think, act, and feel.

Children learn how to respond to stress by what they have seen and experienced in the past. Most stresses experienced by children may seem insignificant to adults, but because children have few previous experiences from which to learn, even situations that require small changes can have enormous impacts on a child's feelings of safety and security.

Pain, injury, and illness are major stressors for children. Medical treatments produce even greater stress. Recognition of parental stress (such as that seen in divorce or financial crisis) is a severe stressor for children, as is death or loss of a loved one.

SIGNS OF UNRESOLVED STRESS IN CHILDREN

Children may not recognize that they are stressed. Parents may suspect that the child is excessively stressed if the child has experienced a potentially stressful situation and begins to have symptoms such as:

* Physical symptoms
o Decreased appetite, other changes in eating habits
o Headache
o New or recurrent bedwetting
o Nightmares
o Sleep disturbances
o Stuttering
o Upset stomach or vague stomach pain
o Other physical symptoms with no physical illness
* Emotional or behavioral symptoms
o Anxiety
o Worries
o Inability to relax
o New or recurring fears (fear of the dark, fear of being alone, fear of strangers)
o Clinging, unwilling to let you out of sight
o Questioning (may or may not ask questions)
o Anger
o Crying
o Whining
o Inability to control emotions
o Aggressive behavior
o Stubborn behavior
o Regression to behaviors that are typical of an earlier developmental stage
o Unwillingness to participate in family or school activities

HOW PARENTS CAN HELP

Parents can help children respond to stress in healthy ways. Following are some tips:

* Provide a safe, secure, familiar, consistent, and dependable home.
* Be selective in the television programs that young children watch (including news broadcasts), which can produce fears and anxiety.
* Spend calm, relaxed time with your children.
* Encourage your child to ask questions.
* Encourage expression of concerns, worries, or fears.
* Listen to your child without being critical.
* Build your child's feelings of self-worth. Use encouragement and affection. Try to involve your child in situations where he or she can succeed.
* Try to use positive encouragement and reward instead of punishment.
* Allow the child opportunities to make choices and have some control in his or her life. This is particularly important, because research shows that the more people feel they have control over a situation, the better their response to stress will be.
* Encourage physical activity.
* Develop awareness of situations and events that are stressful for children. These include new experiences, fear of unpredictable outcomes, unpleasant sensations, unmet needs or desires, and loss.
* Recognize signs of unresolved stress in your child.
* Keep your child informed of necessary and anticipated changes such as changes in jobs or moving
* Seek professional help or advice when signs of stress do not decrease or disappear.

WHAT CHILDREN CAN DO TO RELIEVE STRESS

An open, accepting flow of communication in families helps to reduce anxiety and depression in children. Encourage your children to discuss their emotions and help them discuss simple ways to change the stressful situation or their response to it.

Below are some tips that children can follow themselves to help reduce stress:

* Talk about your problems. If you cannot communicate with your parents, try someone else that you can trust.
* Try to relax. Listen to calm music. Take a warm bath. Close your eyes and take slow deep breaths. Take some time for yourself. If you have a hobby or favorite activity, give yourself time to enjoy it.
* Exercise. Physical activity reduces stress.
* Set realistic expectations. Do your best, and remember that nobody is perfect.
* Learn to love yourself and respect yourself. Respect others. Be with people who accept and respect you.
* Remember that drugs and alcohol never solve problems.
* Ask for help if you are having problems managing your stress.

Positive Thinking - 1

Thought Awareness, Rational Thinking
& Positive Thinking (1)

Introduction:
In preparing for a performance, you may have a whole range of fears, anxieties and negative thoughts associated with the upcoming event. While this is completely normal and is something that everyone experiences, it is important that you deal with these; otherwise, they can undermine your self-confidence.


Negative thinking and negative emotion is something we look at in much more detail in our section on Reducing Stress With Rational Thinking. What we look at here are techniques explicitly focused on managing performance stress.


Firstly we look at “Thought Awareness,” a technique you can use to understand your fears and negative thoughts. We then look at rational thinking and positive thinking as ways of countering the negative thoughts you have identified.


Using the Tool:


Thought Awareness
You are thinking negatively when you fear the future, put yourself down, criticize yourself for errors, doubt your abilities or expect failure. Negative thinking can damage confidence, harm performance and paralyse mental skills.


Unfortunately, negative thoughts have a tendency to flit into our consciousness, do their damage and then flit back out again, with their significance having barely been noticed. Since we barely notice these negative thoughts, we do not challenge properly, which means they can be completely incorrect and wrong. This does not stop them doing damage.


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



To use the technique, observe your “stream of consciousness” as you think about the upcoming event. Do not suppress any thoughts. Instead, just let them run their course while you make note of them.


As you notice negative thoughts, write them down and then let them go.



Examples of common negative thoughts might be:

* Fear about the quality of your performance or of problems that may interfere with it;
* Worry about how the audience or the press may react to you;
* Worries about how you appear to others, for example, important people;
* A preoccupation with the symptoms of stress;
* Dwelling on the negative consequences of a poor performance;
* Self-criticism over less than perfect rehearsal and practice, or
* Feelings of inadequacy.

Thought awareness is the first step in the process of eliminating negative thoughts: You cannot counter thoughts that you do not know you think.


Rational Thinking
The next step in dealing with negative thinking is to challenge the negative thoughts that you wrote down 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? What evidence is there for and against the thought? Would your friends or mentors agree with the thought or disagree with it?


Looking at some of the examples above, the following challenges could be made to some of these common negative thoughts:

* Quality of performance: Have you trained yourself as well as you reasonably should have? Have you gathered the information you need and prepared properly for the event? Have you conducted a reasonable number of rehearsals? If so, you've done as much as you can to give a good performance.
* Problems of distraction and issues outside your control: Have you conducted appropriate contingency planning and created a Performance Plan? Have you thought about how you will manage all likely contingencies and prepared a solution? If so, you will be well prepared to handle potential problems.
* Worry about other people’s reaction: If you perform the best you can, then you should be completely satisfied. If you give a good performance, fair people are likely to respond well. If people are not fair, then this is something outside your control, and the best thing to do is to ignore and rise above any unfair comments.
* Problems during practice: If some of your practice was less than perfect, then remind yourself that the purpose of practice is to identify problems so that they will not be repeated during the performance. Similarly, ask yourself whether it is reasonable to expect perfect performance at all times. All that is important is that you perform well when you need to.

Tip:
If you find it difficult to look at your negative thoughts objectively, imagine that you are your best friend or a respected coach or mentor. Look at the list of negative thoughts and imagine the negative thoughts were written by someone you were giving objective advice to, and think how you would challenge these thoughts.


These are some examples of how you can challenge negative thinking. You should be able to quickly see whether the thoughts are wrong, or whether they have some substance to them. Where there is substance to the negative thoughts, take appropriate action. In these cases, negative thinking has been an early warning system for you, showing where you need to direct your attention.


Positive Thinking
Where you have used Rational Thinking to identify incorrect negative thinking, it is useful to prepare rational, positive thoughts and affirmations to counter these negative thoughts.


Positive affirmations help you to build self-confidence and change negative behavior patterns into positive ones. By basing your affirmations on the clear, rational assessments of fact that you made using Rational Thinking, you can use them to undo the damage that negative thinking may have done to your self-confidence.


Continuing the example above, positive affirmations could be:

* Quality of performance: “I have trained hard for this event. I have prepared well and have rehearsed thoroughly. I am well prepared to give an excellent performance.”
* Problems of distraction and issues outside your control: “I have thought through everything that might reasonably happen and have planned how I can handle all likely contingencies. I am well placed to react flexibly to events.”
* Worry about other people’s reaction: “Fair people will react well to a good performance. I will rise above any unfair criticism in a mature and professional way.”
* Problems during practice: “I have experimented with and learned from my practice. This has put me in a position where I can deliver a great performance.”

Tip 1:

Supporting this, you can also use confidence boosting affirmation scripts, like "Thinking Positive" from Meditainment.


Tip 2:
Traditionally, people have advocated positive thinking almost recklessly, as if it is a solution to everything. Positive thinking should be used with common sense: No amount of positive thinking can make everyone who applies it an Olympic champion marathon runner (though an Olympic marathon runner is unlikely to have reached this level without being pretty good at positive thinking!)


First, decide rationally what goals you can realistically attain with hard work, and then use positive thinking to reinforce these.



Summary:
This set of tools helps you to manage and counter the negative thinking that can undermine a good performance.


Thought Awareness helps you to understand the fear and negative thinking that may damage your self-confidence in the time leading up to an event.


Rational Thinking is a technique that helps you to challenge your negative thoughts and either learn from them, or refute them as incorrect.


Positive Thinking is a technique you use to create positive affirmations that you can use to counter negative thoughts, neutralizing them and building your self-confidence.