Analysis Of The Stress Management Strategies
The years of university can often be referred to as the “the great years of our lives,” since we meet many new people, have many new experiences, and learn many new things all simultaneously. With the countless positive memories, it's easy to lose sight of the numerous challenges that university can present. For a lot of university students, these years may turn into the most stressful ones. Before understanding the causes of stress, it is important to outline what stress is.
Although, the definition of stress is complex to define, it can range from an event, response or state that conveys confusion and uncertainty. Stress is not always a bad thing as it often can help people to stay focused and motivated, but others respond to it in a manner that causes it to become harmful to their health. For many, these stressors may be seen as situational factors of a new school environment, a new schedule, and the overwhelming amount of information packed into the lectures. Others concern themselves with maintaining a high level of academic achievement to live up to their parent’s expectations, the maturational factors of adjusting to the first time being away from home and adapting to a completely new social environment in which they have to establish new friendships. Sociocultural factors such as financial status can also be the common root of numerous students high stress levels while attending university. Even though, sometimes it may feel as if there is nothing that can be done about stress, there are a number of ways to manage it.
Managing stress is important to ensure emotional and mental well-being, but also ultimately to avoid contracting stress related disorders from prolonged exposure. Stress management can be achieved through the primary, secondary, and tertiary modes of prevention. Although stress is impractical to completely eliminate, employing stress management strategies can help to prevent, reduce, and tolerate stress that comes along with the demands of university. Among the various stress management strategies, being able to identify the symptoms and risk factors that onset stress is a crucial aspect in its primary prevention. Some criteria of stress symptoms can include irritability, sleep deprivation, low energy, drinking, smoking, abnormal social and personal functioning. When the symptoms are recognized it provokes a subconscious alarm that gives warning of a potential risk of stress and allows for stress management strategies to be initiated early on so that the person can avoid it. Identifying the sources of stress in life is equally as important in its prevention.
In the Neuman's systems model, the primary prevention of stress occurs by minimizing the risk factors that lead to stress and ultimately impede it from occurring. This model reveals how crucial it is to recognize the specific aspects of life that make someone stressed early on, in order to then access the feelings and behaviours that are attributed to these events. Once this is accomplished, implementation of a care plan of successful stress management strategies will diminish the levels of stress experienced when those situations reappear in the future. In the scope of nursing, this occurs when assessing a patient in an interview through objective and subjective findings. The nurse observes the appearance and nonverbal ques known as the objective findings for indication of stress. The nurse also determines subjective findings by figuring out maladaptive coping strategies or situations that previously have caused stress. The overwhelming workloads and deadlines for university students may continually be a stressor, but by evaluating the behaviours that may contribute to the stressor such as procrastination, establishes a starting point for a plan to be put into action that prevents this. J
ournal writing is a useful tool in identifying the sources of stress and ultimately managing it. Journaling permits reflective practice and contemplation as well as acts as a therapeutic outlet to stress. For this reason, jotting down situations that cause stress and then reflecting on the feelings or actions that may have led to or accompany the aspects, is the primary prevention strategy in stress management that can stop stress from occurring dead in its tracks. By knowing the symptoms and risk factors that cause stress, support systems can be used as a coping strategy for stress if it surpasses primary prevention. The use of support systems to rely on is a considerable strategy for secondary prevention of stress. Neuman’s system model describes secondary prevention of stress to be the steps taken after the symptoms emerge that find coping mechanisms to deal with the stress. Since the prevention at this point is concerned with managing or reducing the stress that is already in effect, support systems are an effective method to achieve this.
According to Potter, Stockert, Perry, and Hall (2019) support systems can be friends, family members or colleagues that will listen, give advice, and provide emotional support that can have a beneficial effect. Support systems provide positive effects in the form of communicating caring by taking the time to listen, but also by validating the person's feelings. Furthermore, support systems help facilitate other adaptive coping strategies to manage stress. With the emotional support, it allows for talking over problems and getting help from someone in making decisions on how to move forward. In the nursing profession, if a patient has been informed of a serious health concern, they may become stressed. During this stressful event the patient may need the nurse as a support system for guidance on how to inform family and how to manage the stress. If there is nothing that can be done to alter the stressful event, the patient may need the nurse as a support system simply to be present. This scenario directly shows how support systems can play many roles in stress management from giving advice to simply listening and validating that stressful feeling. Similarly, in the case of university students, these support systems can be more than just friends and family as it can also include academic advisors and counseling services that can provide information and emotional support. Confiding in these university support systems can help validate the stressful feeling and work towards its reduction to ensure the student is on the track to success. If support systems are not enough to relieve stress, crisis intervention is the next step in order to achieve tertiary prevention.
Crisis intervention is an adequate, last resort, stress management strategy in order to attain tertiary prevention. Crisis intervention refers to when the stress level has got so high that the regular coping strategies are no longer successful in returning the person to the level of functioning before the crisis. This means that every resource possible has to be employed in order to assist in reducing the person’s stress level to a point at which tertiary prevention can intervene and remove the stress. The tertiary level of stress prevention refers to the process of rehabilitation to remove stress and allow coping strategies to be successful in doing so. Therefore, tertiary prevention is the essential last step in reducing stress levels so that one can return to normal functioning levels. This is only possible to achieve with crisis intervention in the extreme cases where secondary prevention coping strategies no longer have an effect.
The main approach in crisis intervention is problem solving, with a focus on the specific reason for being stressed. For example, if a student has become so stressed out from circumstances in university that it has changed the direction of the person's life in some way, the student would seek out counseling to firstly identify the problem, understand the reaction, and evaluate which strategies have already been tested. Secondly, the student and the counselor would come up with new coping strategies that aid in relieving the crisis. From a nurse’s perspective, this approach occurs when the nurse helps the patient draw a connection between their stress and their reaction. Then they can explore new stress management strategies that could help in alleviating the crisis and preventing stress earlier on in the secondary mode with support systems.
The crucial element in crisis intervention is the outside perspective that aids in understanding the stress of the situation more clearly through reflection. This process links crisis intervention with primary and tertiary prevention in a cycle. Reflection upon the stressful situation in crisis intervention results in awareness of strengths and resources that perhaps before, went unrecognized. This new awareness and reflection carries into the rehabilitation process in tertiary prevention to keep stress in check until it is eliminated. Reflection upon the events that causes stress in the past can be classified as risk factors to keep reduced in the primary stress prevention mode.
Nevertheless, the stress management strategies in all three modes of prevention and crisis intervention are powerful mechanisms for stress prevention, reduction, and evasion. Unfortunately, the stressors of daily life for university students are unable to be completely eradicated, but with the proper use of stress management strategies it is possible to diminish and control. Identifying the symptoms and risk factors that induce stress is a prominent strategy in primary prevention. It is recognizing stress before it has the chance to occur, through knowledge of symptoms and situations that increase the likelihood of becoming stressed. The use of support systems is an effective strategy in secondary prevention as a coping mechanism to confide in others for help in the form of validation, listening, and information about coping strategies to reduce stress. If the stress level is unmanageable with the strategies that are available, crisis intervention is the final remedy to establish new strategies that will eliminate the stress crisis and get on the track of tertiary prevention.
Each one of the stress management strategies is a powerful tool on its own to reduce stress, but having all them in combination with each other goes a long way in diminishing and managing stress levels. Nowadays for students with societal, parental, and academic stress it is common to wonder how to manage it. It is easy to get overwhelmed and think, “When will it end?” Sadly there is no chance of living a life without stress, but just remember that, no matter how stressful it may seem, there are strategies that give you the power to alleviate and conquer it.
