Stress Hardiness
Some individuals are able to deal and cope with stress better than others! Hardiness is the ability to deal effectively with stress. People can become tougher and stress-hardy through encountering stress, coping, and learning from experiences!
Everyone can learn to enhance stress-hardiness skills! Three Cs are the components of hardiness:
- Control
- Challenge
- Commitment
How to Improve Stress Toughness
Control
- Believe that you have control over your life.
- You can manage any problem that you face.
- Your outlook is positive!
- Feeling in control helps to decrease stress.
Challenge
- View life as a challenge.
- Do not see it as a threat or an endless group of problems.
- Seek and take on challenges.
- Believe that you will learn from challenging experiences!
Commitment
- Have a mission.
- Be committed to what you do.
- Believe that what you're doing is meaningful, purposeful, and right!
Ways to Improve Stress Hardiness
- Respond appropriately to change.
- Assess how you react to changes and to stress.
- Remember that not all types of change are negative!
- Downplay and minimize the effects of change through exploring the consequences of change.
- Change your self-talk!
- Watch and monitor what you say to yourself.
- Write your thoughts down. Often this reveals them to be illogical, incorrect, or harmful.
- Modify interpretation and the meaning of self-talk so that it is not negative.
- Switch your inner voice from "I can't" to "I can handle it!"
Self-Talk Tip
Things are neither good nor bad, but thinking makes them so.—Shakespeare
Practice relaxation skills.
Relaxation strategies are used to reduce stress, relax, and improve toughness! They allow time to regroup, recharge, and reduce the physical and mental responses to stress. Relaxation techniques include muscle relaxation, breathing, imagery, visualization, meditation, and prayer.
Get fit!
Staying and maintaining physical fitness is a great stress buster! Keep your body tuned up and ready to go. This helps to buffer and immunize against the effects of stress.
Practice hardiness.
Face tough situations, and handle the distress. Practice the coping skills of healthy responses to stress, positive self-talk, and relaxation strategies. View the situation as a challenge, and believe that it will be okay. See yourself as stress-hardy!
Stress-Reduction Tip
Don't sweat the small stuff! It's almost all small stuff!—Dr. Richard Carlson
Stress-Hardy Plan
What is your plan to improve your toughness and stress-hardiness?
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When will you start to get tougher?
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How will you improve your hardiness?
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Where will you practice?
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Remember the three Cs: Hardiness is viewing yourself as in Charge, in Control, and positively Challenged! Look at your aggravations and hassles as a quiz on how well you are handling stress.
U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center. (n.d.). Stress hardiness [PPT]. Retrieved August 6, 2021, from https://www.powershow.com