I recently read about a concept called Stress Hardiness, which was first coined by Susanne Kobasa. To cut a long story short stress, in whatever form it enters your life, is a contributing factor to anxiety. If we can control our stress levels and respond to stress more appropriately then we can start to control our anxiety levels more. Note that I don’t use "beat stress" here. That is because stress is in our lives and makes us move and act, without any stressors for a length of time life is pretty dull.
Beating anxiety come, in part, from controlling how we react to stress.
Most of us don’t like stress. But some lucky blighters seem to positively thrive on it. Some people manage to use stress to promote them to great heights! Others tend to go the opposite direction, being reduced to fear, panic, insomnia and of course anxiety.
So why is it that some people apparently like stress, while others can’t stand it. Well, like so much of life (and even more of mental health) it comes down to attitude.
Kobasa found that there are three attitudes that help people thrive from stress:
1. Number one is "Commitment". That means that it’s ok for some things in life to cause you stress, but they need to be things you are committed to. A job you love can still be stressful, but when a job you hate is stressful you are very unhappy. In fact, we all go through immense amounts of stress for things we love: childbirth and pregnancy, bank holiday traffic, exercise programmes. These things that cause us stress but that we don’t mind so catastrophically (and if you give it a few minutes thought I am sure you can identify your own in your life) are good signs, now you can tell yourself that you can take stress, instead of constantly reinforcing the idea that you can’t.
2. Number two is "control". The more control you have in a situation the more stress you can take. Of course you can’t control the whole lot, or everyone, but you can control some parts of situations and willfully decide to relinquish control of the other parts, this is also strangely empowering.
3. Number three is "challenge". That basically means you need to be able to see the problem you are tackling as an opportunity to grow and find out new things. If you see struggles in that light they become easier to deal with.
For anxiety sufferers the key is to try and reassess the stress in your life using those criteria, and starting with the smallest trying to reengage with that area of stress and this time, control it!
