10 methods to increase stress resistance

The modern world keeps people in constant tension. This leads to an increase in negative emotions and prolonged stress. To keep your psychological state at a high level, it is extremely important to know how to develop stress resistance and resist negative influences.

Resilience is essential in the workplace

Definition

Resilience is the process of adapting to difficult life situations - trauma, tragedy, threats, or severe stress caused, for example, by family and relationship problems, serious health problems, difficulties at work, or financial problems. Stress resistance is also the ability to resist such circumstances and return to a normal state of mind.

Research has shown that resilience to stress is the norm rather than something extraordinary. People often demonstrate resilience to stress. One example is the response of many Russians to the terrorist attacks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the attempts of individuals to rebuild their lives.

It is important to understand that being resilient does not mean that a person does not experience difficulties or suffering. Emotional pain and sadness are common in people who have suffered significant adversity or trauma in their lives. And the development of stress resistance will most likely be accompanied by significant emotional stress.

However, resilience is not a trait that people either have or don't have. It includes behavior as a whole and individual actions, thoughts and beliefs that can be learned and developed in everyone.

Signs

Qualities that a stress-resistant person has:

low level of emotionality;
a tendency to introspection, adequate self-esteem, a well-developed internal locus - an understanding of one’s own responsibility for what is happening;
self confidence;
subsequence;
equilibrium;
sociability and friendliness;
stable, strong, low excitable type of nervous system;
strong willpower, strong character, perseverance, determination;
well-developed motivational sphere, the presence of moral principles, a well-structured hierarchy of values;
the presence of personal experience accumulated from already experienced stressful situations.

Each of these qualities can be developed in yourself.

Factors of stress resistance

A number of factors contribute to stress tolerance. Many studies show that the main factor influencing resilience is caring and supportive relationships within and outside the family. Relationships that build love and trust, provide role models, and offer encouragement and support help increase a person's resilience to stress.

Also, the following factors can contribute to high stress resistance:

Ability to make realistic plans and take steps to achieve them.
A positive view of yourself and confidence in your strengths and abilities.
Communication and problem solving skills.
The ability to manage strong feelings and impulses.

Each of us can develop all these factors individually or together. Both independently and using the services of specialists for their development.

Ways to increase

Volitional personality traits - what is it in psychology, their formation

Many sources of literature write about stress resistance, how to develop it, how to increase the level of resistance to stress.

The most useful ways are:

Listening to the body. You should be more conscious, understand what the body wants. The body is not a robot; it needs the care and participation of its owner. If you want to get enough sleep, then you shouldn’t get out of bed abruptly in the morning; if you don’t want to do this or that work, you should refuse it.
Vitamin D and walks. The sun's rays have a positive effect on the body, helping to increase its resistance even to very serious diseases. It is advisable to allocate at least 30 minutes a day for relaxation and a walk in the fresh air.

Walking in sunny weather increases stress resistance

To increase stress resistance, it is incredibly important to be able to forgive. This skill needs to be trained. When you feel offended and angry at another person, cortisol is released, which contributes to the production of stress.
Sports and physical activity. This method will help tone your muscles and increase your resistance to stress.
Yoga and meditation. They will help you get rid of negative emotions in a very short time and relax.
Reducing sweets in the diet. With excessive consumption of fast carbohydrates, the hormone cortisol enters the bloodstream, which provokes stress.
Put away gadgets for a while. You can practice this method for one day once a week.
Sound therapy, for example, classical music, birdsong, the sound of the sea and surf, will help develop stress resistance.

Strategies for increasing stress resistance

It is important to understand that developing stress resistance is a process. It is not something that happens to you once or never happens. People react to traumatic and stressful life events in different ways. A way to build resilience that works for one person may not work for another. Different people use different strategies to develop resilience to stress.

Below are 10 ways that, according to the American Psychological Association, are the leading ways to overcome stress and develop stress resistance. You can use them to develop your personal strategy for increasing stress resistance.

Psychologist's advice

Finding time to recover and relax with your family is an investment in your health and well-being. To support children in developing mindfulness, it is worth starting an independent practice, such as yoga or meditation. This will help shape your personality and teach you how to deal with irritants.

How to increase medication endurance and self-control?

Stress resistance and self-control do not develop in one month. In such a case, you will have to be patient before finding the right answer. In some cases, drugs are used to bring the nervous system of an adult in order. They should only be prescribed by a doctor.

Popular medications include:

metabolism regulating glycine,
Valocordin, which has a sedative effect.

You can also take the medications Novo-Passit and Persen during treatment.

Exploring your past

It is also important to study your past experience. Focusing on past events and sources of personal strength can help you discover what strategies to increase your resilience to stress have already worked for you and therefore may work in the future.

To do this, write down the answers to the following questions about yourself and your reactions to difficult life events. This will help you learn more about how to effectively respond to difficult situations in your life.

Consider the following:

What types of events were the most stressful for me?
How did these events usually affect me?
Do I remember people who matter to me when I'm stressed?
Who did I turn to for help in stressful situations or traumatic experiences?
What have I learned about myself and my relationships with others during difficult times?
Was it helpful for me to help someone else through a similar experience?
Was I able to overcome the circumstances, and if so, how?
What helped me maintain hope?

Are there any downsides?

In psychology, stress tolerance, like many other personality traits, is viewed from two perspectives. On the one hand, this is a necessary quality that allows you to survive in difficult situations. However, sometimes it can turn out to be harmful.

Emotionality

Resistance to stress can lead to callousness and indifference—properties that negatively impact family and social life. If you constantly suppress emotions in yourself, in the future this will happen automatically and will work not only in difficult life situations, but also in ordinary ones - everyday ones. Difficulties will arise when you need to be happy for someone, express sympathy, or feel sorry for them.

Overload

A person becomes so fixated on irritating factors that he sees them where they are not there. For example, the boss calls you to his place. And the scrolling of possible scenarios begins: he will fire you, reprimand you, ask you to go to work on the weekend, give you a new task. An algorithm of actions for each of them is immediately formed in your head. That’s it, before entering the office, a person is calm and absolutely confident in himself, since there is a plan for any development of events. As a result, he was simply asked to notify everyone about the upcoming meeting. This approach can quickly deplete the body and cause psychological fatigue.

Self-Esteem Balance

To train stress resistance, you need to work with self-esteem. If it is increased, it must be lowered, and vice versa. It is quite difficult to find a middle ground, and many go too far.

Be flexible

Resilience involves maintaining flexibility and balance in your life when dealing with stressful circumstances and traumatic events.

This happens in several ways, including:

Allowing yourself to experience and express strong emotions, on the one hand, and avoiding them, on the other hand, where it would be inappropriate.
When necessary, actively “attack” problems, taking actions to solve them, and when necessary, return to rest and restore yourself.
Spend time with loved ones to gain support and inspiration, but also to take care of yourself.
Leaning on others, not forgetting to rely on yourself.

Resource state

A resource state is a state in which you felt good and comfortable at some point in time. This could be your trip abroad, it could be your visit to relatives or the purchase of some kind of animal. That is, everything is exactly what gave you joy and a feeling of happiness at that moment. Perhaps this is your receiving a cash bonus based on the results of your work, perhaps winning the lottery, etc. Everything here is very individual, and depends only on what exactly gives you a feeling of joy and happiness. Let's take an example of how this feeling comes to you while relaxing at sea.

Now you need to learn to mentally reproduce the situation when you are relaxing at sea. This way you get this resource back. The resource state that you had. The resource state has the property of giving you additional energy. If you have a lot of energy and your body’s protective functions are at a high level, then stress simply stops affecting you. The body becomes uninterested in experiencing stress!

Think about it: is a running rhinoceros stressed because he stepped on a couple of ants? Yes, he simply doesn’t notice them!

The task of the exercise is to be able to induce this resource state. Several times a day, when you have another break, you can close your eyes for a few minutes and imagine that you are at sea. You feel the sun, the beach, the warm water in which you swim. You feel good and comfortable. When you stay in this state for some time, you will feel a surge of strength and energy, which means stress will bother you less.

Use your “places of strength and support”

Getting support when you need it is critical to strengthening your resilience to stress. In addition to talking to family and friends, it may also be helpful to reach out to the following sources of support:

Self-help and support groups. Various groups can help people who are struggling with difficulties, such as the death of a loved one. By sharing information, ideas, and emotions with others, group members can help each other and find comfort in knowing they are not alone in their struggles.
Books and other publications by people who have successfully coped with difficult life situations, such as cancer. These stories may encourage readers to find a strategy that may work for them personally.
Internet resources. Information on the Internet can be a useful source of ideas, although the quality of the information depends on the sources.

Don't be afraid to turn to specialists

For many people, using their own resources and the types of help listed above may be enough to increase their resilience to stress. However, sometimes a person may get stuck or have difficulty making progress towards resilience.

In this case, a good professional, such as a psychologist, can help you develop an appropriate strategy moving forward. It is important to get professional help if you feel like you are unable to function or perform basic daily activities as a result of a traumatic or other stressful life experience.

You can use any of the above methods to develop your own stress-resilience strategy. The main thing is that this strategy is, on the one hand, comfortable for you, and on the other hand, quite effective. Good luck to you!

Why insomnia?

The next point to analyze is insomnia.

It is well known that if a person does not recover during the night, that is, does not get enough sleep (and this is 7 or 8 hours of sleep), then he will not physically have enough strength to work through the whole day and function normally.

In this case, the body will simply begin to fail. In fact, this is fraught with the same psychosomatic diseases, when the body itself forcibly stops a person from certain activities. In other words, psychosomatics simply causes illness.

If year after year you have conflicts with the same person and the situation is not resolved, a simple psychosomatic illness begins, which, due to neurosis, forces you to go to the hospital or something even worse.

Therefore, sleep is a very important point that must be observed. You should always have enough energy for the day.

Afterword

You can overcome stress only through activity (search activity), but not in the form of meaningless and dangerous fuss, but with a well-thought-out plan of action. You can't just wait, you need to help yourself. Increasing stress resistance is facilitated by such qualities as emotional stability, endurance, perseverance, openness, goodwill, determination, and low levels of anxiety.

Sometimes people intuitively and subconsciously look for ways to relax, rest, and relaxation. Thus, laziness is sometimes a sign of overwork and the body’s attempts to change activities and rest. It is important to be able to relax and calm down in order to restore resources and set yourself up for productive work.

Increasing stress resistance means regularly working on yourself and developing your personality. A person who knows who he is and where he is going is difficult to lead astray. Thus, in order to increase stress resistance and prevent stress, you need to work on your body (nutrition, sports, care), emotions (release of emotions, everyday joys, hobbies as an outlet and a favorite activity in which you will definitely succeed), mind (self-acceptance and love to yourself, regular development).

A crisis is not a problem from which there is no way out

When a person is unable to change the course of a situation and the circumstances that he has to experience, it is necessary to change his attitude and reaction to them. Try to look beyond the framework of the present. We need to imagine that the situation will become much better in the future. Thus, subconsciously a person will begin to pull himself out of current life circumstances and strive for the goal of improving them. It is important to pay attention to even the smallest details and reasons why the condition improves, and try to return to them more often.

Sound therapy

Another way to get rid of stress is to listen to various relaxing music compositions. Classical music works very well in the direction of relaxation and getting rid of stress, but it is worth noting that it does not necessarily have to be music as such. Nowadays you can find collections of various soothing sounds everywhere, such as birdsong, the rustle of the wind, the sound of the surf, the sound of rain and much more. Some services even offer you the ability to combine dozens of similar sounds to create your own sound background, meaning you can personalize the sound, adjusting it to your specific state.

What characterizes a stress-resistant person?

Stress resistance has several components, and each of them plays its role in the overall characteristics of a person.

Psychophysiological factor. It is a characteristic of the nervous system and its state. After all, a person may have neurological diseases, which should definitely be taken into account when assessing his actions.
Volitional factor. This is conscious control over one’s actions and their compliance with a specific situation.
Motivational factor. A person's resilience is determined by the strength of his motives.
Emotional factor. It reflects a person's experiences with similar situations in his past.
Intellectual factor. This is the ability to correctly analyze the current situation and calmly make the only correct decision.

According to expert assessments by leading psychologists, only thirty percent of people living on the globe can be called stress-resistant. There are professions that require high stress tolerance, for example, military personnel, firefighters, doctors, especially surgeons, police officers, and athletes. Without it, you don’t have to try to master such specialties, because things won’t go beyond theory.

Any emergency situation will throw a stress-resistant person out of balance. If he fulfilled the standards “excellently” during training sessions, then in a real stop he will not cope with his purpose and will let down other people who need his help.

To take care

It is necessary to pay attention to your feelings and needs, to take part in activities that bring pleasure and relaxation. This affects the development of stress resistance. Exercises such as meditation are also helpful. Physical exercise is also a must.

You need to help yourself keep your mind clear and your body healthy so that you always have the strength to deal with stress.