Tips on how to get a grip on Stress, part 2

By Sonya Yeh Spencer, ITA NLP Trainer, Educator, Coach

In our last Newsletter we had an overview of where stress and anxiety came from – as a response to life events. I have challenged you to ask yourself “if there is a positive purpose or message that this feeling (stress or sense of anxiousness) has for me, what would that be?”

Thank you for providing me with a range of responses from “there is no message” to “it is asking me to think what I am doing”. These are messages for you and there are no right or wrong answers. I continue to invite you to explore what your emotions are trying to communicate to you on a daily basis and to discover aspects of yourself.

I present you here with a way of identifying factors that might cause individuals to respond with a sense of stress and anxiety. The first step is to understand the structure of an unhelpful emotional response:

1. There is an event that we are responding to.
2. There is a reaction to the event. It could be a feeling, thought, self talk or  reasoning, and or behaviour.
3. There is a belief or interpretation we have about the event that caused us to react the way we did.
4. There are unmet expectations. This means the reality of an event is different from what you have speculated, imagined or believed it to be.

Once you have identified the contents in the structure, step 2 will be to evaluate the validity of these contents, what your options are:

• to create change, or
• to re-adjust and respond differently.

We will explore some questions that you can ask to explore this structure further and gain more insight in the next newsletter. As always, please feel free to send me an email to share your findings and thoughts.