Not All Stress Is the Same

Stress management (Stress Managment) is not about making stress disappear. It is about growing the capacity of your own mind, so that you can keep stress in check — and even put it to good use. To achieve effective stress management, you must first recognise what stress actually is.

The word "stress" is hardly a stranger in our daily lives. According to the categories in psychology's Dundee Stress State Questionnaire (DSSQ), "stress" falls mainly into: Distress, Worry, and Lack of Task Engagement.

Different kinds of stress need to be met with the right approach before they can be eased effectively. This article will introduce the causes, the signs, and the ways to relieve each type of stress.

The First Type of Stress: Distress

This type of stress usually shows up around immediate problems, or as a reaction in the aftermath of something going wrong — failing an exam, the run-up to a job interview, and so on. It triggers certain instinctive responses or emotions: feeling hurt, distressed, tense, and the like.

The distress response is in fact a kind of biological instinct. When an organism meets danger, a stress response kicks in and the body changes — the heart beats faster, for example. This type of response actually helps us cope with crises and react more nimbly.

But when the symptoms of distress appear, many people's instinct is to force themselves to stop feeling distressed. Feeling tense before an interview is perfectly normal, yet many people keep trying to force that tension away. The result is the opposite of what they intended: in the end they feel tense not because of the interview, but because of feeling tense.

Suggested approach: Don't rush to make the stress response stop. Instead, observe your own stress in a calm, watchful way, and notice the state of your body — your heartbeat, your breathing, and so on. When we let go of trying to control Distress, this kind of stress will flow away of its own accord.

The Second Type of Stress: Worry

This type of stress is usually not about something happening right now, but about things that are uncertain — or that haven't even happened yet. For example, assuming that failing an exam means having no good future, or that a failed venture will affect the years to come.

Worry pulls us out of the present moment, making it hard to get a grip on the task at hand. Take an example: imagine you have an important date tonight, so over breakfast your mind is elsewhere, fixed on the dinner ahead; back at the office your mind keeps drifting to when you can knock off, with no energy left for work. This type of stress is Worry.

Suggested approach: Try not to fix your attention on what is about to happen. Bring your attention back to the present, and focus it on yourself — notice your footsteps, your surroundings in the moment, and so on. This ability to bring your attention back to the present is one that can be strengthened through systematic mindfulness practice.

The Third Type of Stress: Lack of Task Engagement

The feeling behind this type of stress is the sense that whatever you do is in vain. It is usually brought on by two factors: believing that things cannot be changed; and being unable to find any meaning in what you are doing.

For instance, someone learning a foreign language might give up halfway, perhaps because they feel they cannot grasp it, or because they see no strong need to keep learning it — or for both reasons at once.

Faced with this disorienting sense of powerlessness, we need to recognise the real goal of what we are doing, and seek out a way to break through. There is no single answer for tackling this lack of engagement: some people may need to read more widely, to seek the help of an expert, and to hold on to the meaning that carries them through the impasse.

Suggested approach: While we can't tell you here exactly what method will break the impasse, we believe it is important to seek out and pursue the things that make you feel passionate. One of the great uses of mindfulness, too, is that it helps us become more aware of how we react to things — so that we can catch our thoughts and make a change.

Make Good Use of Resources to Handle Stress

All of the suggested approaches above are grounded in mindfulness (Mindfulness), a way of training the mind that has grown popular in recent years. To put these methods to use with greater ease, why not pair them with the mindfulness guided practice recordings we've prepared for you.

What's more, according to a study from UMass, stress has become an enormous cost in the modern workplace. Among its findings: 40% of staff turnover is down to stress, and highly stressed employees add 50% to a company's medical expenses. It is fair to say stress management is now a problem no modern manager can afford to overlook.

To ease stress at work, mindfulness is no bad approach. With workplace stress in mind, we have specially designed a stress-management recording for people with busy jobs to use. To bring mindfulness into your workplace culture in greater depth, you can also browse our stress-management programme.

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Stress management isn't only an individual matter. When an entire team is carrying stress, support at the organisational level is what truly makes the difference. MindForest's enterprise solution lets employees work through the sources of their stress at any time through AI conversation, and connects them to professional support when they need it — reaching out proactively, rather than waiting until a colleague can no longer cope.