Stress Management 12-Marker Example

There are three main areas of stress management – Psychological, Physiological and Alternative. These affect individuals in different ways in order to reduce the effects of stress. For example, Psychological management contains developing specific mental skills to cope with future situations of stress, whereas Physiological management involves preventing the body itself from responding to stressors in the environment.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is used in Psychological Stress management. It aims to reduce negative emotions that may lead to negative response such as anxiety/depression. One of these methods is the ‘Stress Inoculation Training’ (SIT) created by Meichenbaum. This training comprises of three stages;

Conceptualisation – where the client and therapist work together to identify sources of stress in their life.

Skills Training and Rehearsal – the individual develops techniques to cope with stressors.

Application in real life – the individual has the opportunity to practise their newly learnt skills in real-life scenarios and afterwards, evaluate their successes in them.

The SIT is seen as extremely effective as it uses both ‘emotion-focused’ and ‘problem-focused’ approaches to deal with stress. The client learns to produce realistic appraisals of demands upon them and develops sufficient skills to deal with these demands – this is supported by Cox and McKay’s ‘Transactional Model of Stress’, where stress is…