Healthy vs Unhealthy Stress?

How do you handle stress and pressure? What is stopping you from progressing? How do you move from stress to success?

There is a healthy level of stress, termed ‘Eustress’, that enables us to ‘get things done’.

The art of managing stress is to spot or know the tipping point from healthy stress into ‘Distress’ and to stay healthy before tipping.

A very common and normal process

Everyone has stress. People pretty much know that they are stressed when they are. Between worrying about paying your bills, enjoying your social life, problems with work, concerns about family members, day to day hassles, and difficult people in your life, there is a lot to be stressed about.

We have all survived. No matter how difficult it has been, to this point, we have all survived. Very well done!

This is because we evolve stress coping mechanisms. Sometimes they are responses which are adopted and implemented instinctively, which become embedded as automatic patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving in response to stressors. this can be very helpful.

What is the problem?

Stress tends to be reactive. The question for me, as your therapeutic coach, is are those coping mechanisms healthily, efficiently and effectively doing what they were intended to? The art of coping well is in having productive patterns or systems of coping.

Rather than tell you that you are stressed (to which most people respond, “yes, now tell me something that I do not know.”), this measure looks at how you are coping with the stressors in your life.

Now what?

The mere presence of stress does not imply something problematic. The key is how you react to the stress. The results will give you an assessment of how well you are coping. You will receive information on how healthy your coping strategies are.

See side bar for the stress test.

Disclaimer: This assessment is not intended to provide a psychological or psychiatric diagnosis and your completion of the test does not indicate a professional therapeutic or coaching relationship with the administrators of the test.