Everyone experiences stress from time to time, so it is perfectly normal. However, normal doesn’t necessarily mean healthy. Nor is it inevitable! Believe it or not, you can learn how to largely eliminate stress. I don’t mean eliminate the pressures in your life – those will probably persist. The way I think of it, pressure is what is happening to you, but stress is how you react to those pressures. So, you can keep the pressure and get rid of the stress.
Fortunately, stress management is largely a learnable skill. One of the ways to manage stress is to anticipate. By anticipating stress you can prepare for it and work out how to control it when it happens. You can do this in a number of ways:
Rehearsal:
By practicing for a stressful event such as a competitive examination, an interview or a speech several times in advance you can polish your performance and build confidence.
Planning:
By analyzing the likely causes of stress, you will be able to plan your responses to likely forms of stress. These might be actions to alleviate the situation or may be stress management techniques that you will use. It is important that you formally plan for this – it is little use just worrying in an undisciplined way – this will be counterproductive. Formal planning of responses to stress is a technique used by top performers to ensure that they respond effectively to the stresses of competition.
Avoidance:
Where a situation is likely to be unpleasant, and will not yield any benefit to you, it may be one you can just avoid. You should be certain in your own mind; however, that this is the case, and that you are not running away from problems.
Reducing the Importance of an Event:
When an event is important to you, this can make it very stressful. This is particularly true where you are preparing for competitive examination like IIT JEE, CAT etc or operating at a high level, where many people are watching, or where there is the prospect of a large financial reward, of promotion, or of personal advancement. The presence of family, friends or important people can also add to pressure. If stress is a problem under these circumstances, then think carefully about the event – take every opportunity to reduce its importance in your eyes:
- If the event seems big, put it in its place along the path to your goals. Compare it in your mind with bigger events you might know of or might have attended.
- If there is a financial reward, remind yourself that there may be other opportunities for reward later. This will not be the only chance you have. Focus on the quality of your performance. Focusing on the rewards will only damage your concentration and raise stress.
- If members of your family are watching, remind yourself that they love you anyway. If friends are real friends, they will continue to like you whether you win or lose.
- If people who are important to your goals are watching then remind yourself that you may well have other chances to impress them.
- If you focus on the correct performance of your tasks, then the importance of the event will dwindle into the background.
Reducing Uncertainty:
Uncertainty can cause high levels of stress. Causes of uncertainty can be:
- Not having a clear idea of what the future holds
- Not having any career development plans
- Not knowing what will be wanted from you in the future
- Not knowing what your boss or colleagues think of your abilities
- Receiving vague or inconsistent instructions
In these cases lack of information or the actions of other people are negatively effecting your ability to perform. The most effective way of countering this is to ask for the information you need. If you ask in a positive way, then people are usually quite happy to help.
In other words, many times, the reason we get stressed out is not what is happening to us and not what happened in the past, but rather, how we are thinking about what is happening. And by anticipating the basic cause we can minimize the stress.
About the Author: Mr. Pramod Maheshwari is Director (Academics), Career Point, Kota. He is a distinguished scholar and academician in the field of NEET/JEE coaching, and has been involved in guiding aspirants to top-ranking performance in NEET/JEE/NTSE since he founded Career Point in 1993 after completing his B.Tech. from IIT, Delhi.
