How Do You Respond to Stress?

What do you do when you’re stressed? Avoid it? Face it & deal with it?

Stress can be positive or negative. While positive stress can serve a purpose and isn’t necessarily a bad thing, negative stress generally serves no purpose and leads to problems such as lost sleep, weight gain, and mood swings (among others).

But many of the problems associated with negative stress are associated with the way we respond to that stress, rather than the stress itself. This means if we can change the way we respond to stress, we can change the impact it has on us.

What’s your stress response character?

There are three primary ways we can respond to stress. They are:

• The escape artist: this person prefers to live with their head in the sand when it comes to stress. They’re always trying to get out of or away from the stressful situation. Denial is often one of their primary tactics for dealing with stress.
• The distractor: this person won’t deny their stress, but they’ll do whatever they can to distract themselves from it. Procrastination is the distractor’s best friend — they’ll put off dealing with the stress as long as they can by doing other “more important” things.
• The solver: this person focuses on finding solutions to the stress and if there aren’t any solutions, they try to relax and not worry. They face their stress head-on and without delay.