When we talk about stress quickly comes to mind the image of a busy executive on the verge of losing nerves. But the fact is that stress is not the sole property of the working world, much less is only heritage of leadership positions. All of us can be victims of stress. But what we are all equally prepared to face a stressful situation?

If we do a quick survey among people who are around us and we asked them what is stress and what they think it is the most prominent symptom, it may receive as many different answers as people we surveyed.

Stress acute and chronic stress

This is one of the peculiarities of stress: no single definition and its symptoms vary greatly from one person to another. Stress in itself is not a disease. What we know as acute stress is a situation that we timely provoking a reaction that can be physiological, behavioral or psychological. When the stressful situation is prolonged in time becomes chronic stress leading to diseases that can be very disabling to the individual.

In the perception of stress individual differences play an important role. Faced with the same act a person can feel stressed while another poses no problem. Consider for example two people who have just climb and among its new features is to make presentations of a product or idea to a group. For one of them this new situation can make a tremendous experience stress every time you must speak in public, while for the other is nothing more than a routine of a new position.

Some symptoms of stress

Symptoms that might introduce our newly promoted employee may be psychological: anxiety, loss of self-confidence, loss of concentration, and so on.

If symptoms are physical might suffer excessive sweating, dizziness, increased palpitations, dizziness or even crisis panic.

The changes in his behavior could be: a compulsive eating to eliminate anxiety, started in the habit of snuff, or even abuse of alcohol in order to eliminate the physical symptoms causing the stressful situation.

It could have all of these symptoms, or just a few.

Against stress, positive thinking

We can not influence most situations external to us every day, but we can learn to deal with them in different ways, with "positive thinking".

Studies have shown that people who resist stress better have a common feature: optimism. But how people become optimistic? Then we six strategies that will help us be more optimistic:

1. Recognize the negative thought: There are people who tend to focus only on the negative aspects, real or not, of each situation. The stressful situations that were maintained over time increase the tendency for people to focus on the negative aspects. Unesfuerzo must be made aware by analyzing whether we are concentrating only on the bad.

2. And avoid… As soon as we discovered turning to a negative image we must act: stopping our thinking and rationalizing if everything that we have said is real or the result of the tendency to see everything black. Avoid thinking in terms of "all or nothing". The fact that at any particular time something has not gone as we expected, not always mean that, however, will go wrong.

3. Imagination to power. Faced with a situation which may foreseeably cause stress, we must anticipate and mentally imagine a way out of it. In the case of our employee, should exercise viewing all the steps that must be taken to make a statement in public and see how mentally triumphant exceeds each of these steps. Unconsciously people are always imagining how our performance will be in new situations, but many times, even in thought, we imagine failing in the attempt.

4 Highlighting the positive. The best way to do this is by writing. A list of all the good and the other with the bad. They are helping us reflect on the changes we need to make in our lives. In stressful situations, we will have to make an effort to find the positive aspects. The very situation in which we find ourselves prevents us from seeing positive things around us. Given the stress we tend to generalize bad to all areas of life.

5. Learning to value better ourselves. Those who have felt since children unconditionally rated by their parents or close friends, in general, are more optimistic. It is never too late to act like ourselves. We must learn to be more lenient with our own mistakes and find the positive in our conduct.
6. The method Coué. This psychotherapist French developed the strategy of the auto consisting of repeating phrases daily positive about ourselves: "I am a valuable person," "I do not pay the face of difficulties", "I can achieve it," and so on.

Author's Bio: 

Licenciada en Psicología Educativa por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid (España)
Master en Intervención Psicológica en Contextos Educativos por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Experto en Gestión de PYMES por la Escuela Universitaria de Estudios Empresariales de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Experto en Intervención Social y Género por el Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos y el Ministerio de Asuntos Sociales.