#Is Stress Bothering You?

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the Malkan Show podcast. I am Meghana Malkan, thank so much joining me today for this episode of the podcast.

I know your time is valuable and I am really happy that you are listening to me today.

I have begun this podcast because after being coached by the world’s best, I wanted to share with you guys what success habits, success tools, and cues have helped me get onto higher levels of performance at work, have great relationships with my spouse and kids and what really helped me stay focused and motivated all the time.

So, guys let’s dive into the next episode. The word stress has become an important and inseparable component of human life, especially in recent times. When a man knows he’s going to be hanged within a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully. 

This was said by Samuel Johnson in his saying whose truth applies not only to God cases but also everywhere. A major catastrophe that frustrates your central goal of life will either destroy you or forcing a person to use all their psychic energy to erect a barrier around the remaining goals you may have and defending them against further all sorts of fate.

Or it will provide a new, more clear, and urgent goal to overcome the challenges by the defeat.

The choice is yours, if the second road is taken the tragedy is not necessarily detrimental to life. So, what objectively seems a devastating event may come to enrich the victim’s life in a new and unexpected way.

Even the loss of one of the most basic human faculties like that of sight does not mean that the person’s consciousness needs to become impoverished or diminished.

The opposite of often what happens. But what will decide here, what will make that difference? How does it come about that the same blow will destroy one person while another will transform it into an inner order? How does it work that way?

Psychologists generally study answers to such questions under the heading of coping with stress, they observe how people do that. It is obvious that certain events cause more psychological strain than others.

For example, the death of a spouse is several orders of magnitude more stressful than taking out a mortgage or a house which in turn causes more strain than being given a traffic ticket. But it is also clear that the same stressful event might make one person utterly miserable while another will bite the bullet and make the best of it.

This difference in how a person responds to a stressful event is called your ability to cope with stress or your coping style. In trying to say what accounts for a person’s ability to cope with stress it is useful to understand the difference between three kinds of resources.

The first resource is the external support that you have available and especially the network of social supports. Suppose you encounter a major illness for instance and this illness will be mitigated to a certain extension of good insurance and a loving family.

The second one against stress includes a person's psychological resources such as a person’s intelligence, or education, or relevant personality factors. Moving to a new city and having to establish new friendships around will definitely be more stressful to an introvert than to an extrovert.

And finally, the third type of resource refers to the coping strategy that a person uses to confront the stress.

So, of all the three factors the third type which is a coping strategy, that’s what is most relevant to our purpose because external supports by themselves are not that effective in mitigating stress. Of course, they tend to help only those who can help themselves, and psychologically resources are largely outside of our control.

It is difficult to become much smarter or more outgoing than one was at birth In the first place.

How we cope is both the most important factor in determining what effects stress will have and the most flexible resource and the most under our control.

So, let's talk about how one person responds to stress. There are two main ways people respond to stress.

The first one would be called transformational coping which is more on the positive side and the second one would be called regressive coping which is more on the negative side. Let’s understand the difference between them. Let’s take an example from someone who has just been fired from a job at a comfortable age.

Now, losing one’s job is considered to be a major of life stressors and the impact of this loss varies with the person’s age and skills and the amount of their savings, and the conditions of the market at that particular point in time.

Now, if confronted with this unpleasant event, that person has the choice to take one of the two opposite courses of action. He can either withdraw into himself, sleep late, deny what has happened and avoid thinking about it completely.

He can also discharge his frustration by turning up against his family and friends or maybe start disguising it by starting to drink more than usual.  All these are examples of regressive coping or more on the negative approach of coping.

On the other hand, consider the situation where the person can keep his cool completely. Analyzing the problem logically and reassessing his priorities in life.

Afterward, he might redefine what the problem is so that he can solve it more easily. For instance, by deciding to move to a place where his skills are more appreciated and in demand or by refraining himself and acquiring the skills for a new job instead.

And if he takes this course he would be using a more mature way of dealing with stress or more transformational coping and on the positive side.

Having now understood the two different ways of coping with stress, let’s understand the ability to take misfortune and something good to come out of it is a very very rare gift.

Those who possess it are called survivors and are said to have that resilience and that so-called courage. Whatever we call them it is generally understood that they are exceptional people who have overcome great hardships and have surmounted the obstacles that would daunt both men and women.

In fact, when average people are asked to name the individuals they admire the most and to explain why these men and women are admired, the courage and the ability to overcome hardship are the qualities most often mentioned as the reason for admiration.

In this beautiful book, The Flow, the author mentions, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi mentions a short sentence by a philosopher, Zeneca and I love it.

It says, “the good things which belong to prosperity are believed to be wished but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired”. It makes sense of course that people should look up to this quality of coping with hardships more than to any other in their lives.

Of all the virtues you can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. To admire this quality means that we pay attention to those who embody it to totality and we thereby have a chance to emulate it if the need arises.

Therefore admiring courage is itself a positive adaptive trait and those who may do so may be better prepared to ward off the blow of misfortune. So go ahead guys, be courageous.  

April 21st, 2020   #The Malkan Show