Managing Stress and Cognitive Distortions

 

Throughout the week, we spent some time focusing on the topic of stress. Not only in individuals, but in families and couples as well. We talked about a lot of the factors that contribute to stress, for many individuals who are in school, their stress is caused by the amount of schoolwork that they may be expected to accomplish every week. Stress is a normal part of life, at times, it depends on how we respond to stress that may either help us or break us. There are always ways to cope or overcome stress in life.

We also discussed the ten cognitive distortions that people may experience. Those ten distortions are all-or-nothing thinking where you view things in absolute and black and white categories. Over-generalization where you view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat, mental filter, you dwell on the negatives and ignore the positives. Discounting the positive, you insist that your positive qualities don’t count. Jumping to conclusions you jump to conclusions not warranted by the facts.

Magnifications and minimization where you blow things out of proportion or shrink them. Emotional reasoning, you reason from your feelings. Should statements, you use should, shouldn’ts, musts, oughts, and have to’s. Labeling, instead of saying that you made a mistake you instead call yourself a jerk or a loser. Lastly, we have blame, you find fault instead of solving the problem, the two kinds that involve this is self-blame or other blame.

There are moments in everyone’s lives where they may not notice, but they use at least one or some of these whenever they are faced with stressful situations. Speaking from personal experience, I know that I have moments where I used at least one or some of these. Such as, the ones I use sometimes whenever I play soccer and I lose the ball or work in a group and something goes wrong, sometimes I resort to blaming myself. But after those moments, I get back to the game or back to work and do the best I can to improve. I don’t let those feelings affect me in the long term, because even though I am not perfect, I always look for opportunities to do better on what I am willing to improve on.

While talking about the causes of stress and the cognitive distortions that we all experience, we also talk about the benefits and help that we can receive for stress. Some of the benefits include, we have resources such as medical, social, and especially spiritual that can help us cope and overcome stress in our life. We have people in our lives that we could trust and open up to for advice on how to deal with stress. Other things that we can do is take our minds off of whatever may be causing our stress and enjoy an activity by exercising, doing something fun that brings us joy, or taking a break to relax. There are many things that can help us feel relieved and be able to not only help us do what we need to in life, but also enjoy life.

One of the biggest things that has helped me personally with stress is maintaining a balance between working hard and taking care of my responsibilities and having fun in life. Since I am a student in college, I am always doing homework for school to maintain my grades and keep up academically, at times I take a load off to enjoy the activities that the campus may offer or spend time out at the town or play soccer with my friends for exercise. As long as I have taken care of everything I need to, with the time left over, I use it to enjoy myself and relieve some of the stress I may have. We all have ways to cope and overcome stress, I invite you all to find them, use them, and see the benefits that come from them.