Beat Stress with CBT

Solutions and strategies for dealing with stress: a cognitive behavioural therapy toolkit

Stephen Palmer, Christine Wilding

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781444124057
• eBook ISBN: 9781444136531
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

Is your stress threatening to take over your life? 'Beat Stress with CBT' is a clear, hands-on, practical guide to dealing with stress in every situation. It uses an effective, drug-free approach - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - that will give you lasting support and solutions to your stress. Using CBT, you can identify your reaction to stressful situations, and pick out the aspects of your life or personality which feel uncontrollable. This book will give you a straightforward method of measuring and reducing your stress levels, and help you to tackle the related problems such as poor sleep, anxiety, depression or disordered eating or drinking. Using a mixture of immediate solutions and long-term strategies, CBT will help you rework your mindset and find a healthier, less stressful way of life.

1

Understanding stress and its symptoms

In this chapter you will learn:

• to understand what stress actually is – what causes it and how to identify it
• about good stress and bad stress
• the different levels of stress
• the dangers of ignoring stress.

What is stress?

The more you know about your enemies, the easier it is to overcome them. In this case, the enemy is stress. We talk about it, read about it, struggle with it – but what is it exactly? It is certainly one of the most commonly used words in the English language.

Does anyone not think they are stressed? In this day and age, we tend to look askance at the person who tells us that they do not suffer from stress. How can this be? Are they not living their life in the full-tilt, head-on, quart-into-a-pint-pot way that we are programmed to believe is the true way to fulfilment and reward?

While we hope you will find this book really helpful in assisting you in understanding and tackling stress, there are many other ways you can learn about stress. Stress advice proliferates in:

• bookshops
• television chat shows
• magazine articles
• chemists’ shops
• over the garden fence
• and, more and more commonly, in doctors’ surgeries.

What is your view of stress? Get out a note-pad (ideally, a hard-covered notebook that you can dedicate to being your Stress Journal), or use your computer or other electronic system for keeping notes, and write down what being, or feeling, stressed means to you.

Now see if your suggestions match ours. One way in which we can see stress is as a reaction you experience when you feel that, on the one hand, you have too much to cope with, but, on the other hand, it has got to be done, or life as you know it falls apart.

Stress comes along when…
ability to cope = less than situations that must be coped with.

Palmer, Cooper and Thomas (2003) suggest that ‘Stress occurs when perceived pressure exceeds perceived ability to cope.’

Insight

Keep in mind the importance of that word ‘perceived’. (More on this later.)

We also like the type of definition that you may already have taped up on your office wall, and which can be purchased on postcards in high-street shops (and of which there are many variations, we know), which goes along the lines of:

‘Stress is created when your mind overrides the body’s natural desire to choke the living daylights out of an idiot who is driving you completely crazy.’

However, stress can also be created by events outside our control, but to which we give a personal meaning that is at best negative, at worst catastrophic – that is, it is not our inability to cope that stresses us, but our lack of control over the situation.

Insight

Stress tends to occur when the ‘to do’ pile exceeds our perceived coping skills.

Exercise

Look back at any stressful situations in the last week. Jot them down if you have the time. (Shorthand will do.) Now write next to each one either ‘WC’ (within my control) or ‘OC’ (outside my control). Where does the balance lie? Are there more situations than you had imagined that were actually within your control?

But I really can’t control the stress in my life…

Well, actually you can!

When we asked for your definition(s) of stress, did you find that your own definitions were not too different to ours? What this means is that you actually know quite a lot about stress already.

The key points in managing stress are:

• understanding that you have to take responsibility for the stress in your life
• applying what you learn as you work through this book
• believing that if you do these things, you will be able to manage and even eliminate stress from your life.

These points are vital to take on board because the most important element in relieving stress is simply increasing your awareness of how you react to certain situations.

Insight

For the majority of us, the harsh truth is that a great amount of the inappropriate, unhealthy stress we encounter is self-induced.

We can almost hear you becoming quite indignant about this particular insight, but think for a moment: if that weren’t true, there would be little point in us writing this book, and we would just have to accept that there is nothing we can do about stress.

The fact that reducing your stress levels is within your control is a bonus.

We are, of course, not talking about life’s genuine traumas, which are far outside the remit of this book. Here, we are considering, and intending to help you with, the common-or-garden stress that seems to blight our lives daily both at home and at work and which comes from what appears to be the world in general (and possibly the boss in particular) giving you grief.

Insight

• Increasing our awareness of how we react to stress is half the battle.
• Much day-to-day stress in our lives is self-induced.
• This is good news for those (hopefully all readers of this book) who have decided to get rid of stress for good. It means it will be easier than you think!

Exercise

Think of th...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Meet the Author
• In One Minute
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding Stress and Its Symptoms
• 2 Learning How to Measure and Monitor Your Stress Levels
• 3 Thinking your Way Out of Stress
• 4 Become a Detective – Tracking Down Your Stress
• 5 The Physical Effects of Stress and How to Deal With Them
• 6 De-stressing Through Organization
• 7 Overcoming Stress-related Anger
• 8 ‘It’s not Me, It’s Everybody Else!’ – De-stress By Improving your Communication Skills
• 9 Stress at Work, Stress at Home – How to Deal with them without Losing your Job or Your Marriage
• 10 Bringing It All Together: How to Become Stress-resilient for Good
• Taking It Further
• Credits and Acknowledgements