Overview/introduction
As regular listeners have heard me say more than once, stress is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean that stress can’t be managed. After giving this a lot of thought, it occurred to me that there are three main approaches for dealing with stress, you can prepare for stress, avoid it, or cope with it once it occurs. I call my stress management model, the PAC model of stress management. Clever, right? Prepare, avoid, cope … PAC.
By the way, I’ve talked about stress in some prior episodes. If you haven’t listened to those, I encourage you to do so, just go to livewellandflourish.com/60 for the first one. Episodes 61, 64, and 65 also talk about stress and coping.
Let’s talk about each one of the approaches in the PAC model.
Details
Preparation is the key to effectively dealing with stressors when they come up. Stressors, which are environmental triggers of stress, can be better managed by proactively building your resources and resilience. By strengthening these ahead of time, you increase your capacity to handle everyday demands. For example, you might build resources by developing time management skills, broadening and strengthening your social network, or practicing relaxation techniques, such as meditation. You can also build your resilience to stress by practicing cognitive reframing, building a growth mindset, or adopting an optimistic worldview. One of my favorite ways to build resilience is through learning and practicing Stoic techniques. Stoics are all about resilience and they have a lot of techniques and perspectives that can be helpful in building your resources and resilience. I’ll talk about one shortly. By the way, one of the episodes I mentioned earlier, episode 62 is about building a resilience inventory. Link in the show notes, of course.
An interesting approach to preparation is the Stoic practice of “premeditatio malorum” which is sometimes called negative visualization, and means premeditation of evils or adversities. In other words, it’s thinking about what might go wrong. Anticipating future obstacles not only helps you plan for potential problems, making you less likely to be stressed out by them if they come to pass, but also builds your psychological resilience to stress.
For example, suppose you have a new project coming up at work. You could think through potential challenges that might come up when managing your team. These might be resource problems, personnel problems, or challenges from the external environment. This is a good risk management practice, but it will also reduce the stress spike if the hurdles come up by identifying potential obstacles in advance, allowing you to develop appropriate contingency plans. This sort of thinking is why I’m such a big fan of having backup plans. A proactive approach to problem-solving not only minimizes stress but also increases your ability to navigate challenges more easily and effectively.
Avoidance involves taking steps to prevent the encounter of unnecessary stressors by making informed decisions to sidestep them. The word “avoidance” might bring up a negative connotation, as in burying your head in the sand. (Do ostriches actually do this? I need to look that up.) or running from your problems. Those are both unsustainable strategies. Avoidance, in the context of the PAC model, is all about wisely discerning which situations to engage in and which to avoid based on your understanding of yourself and the situation. One useful, but almost trivial example, is closing your email app or browser window when you’re trying to get important work done. This avoids the workload of dealing with interruptions. A much less trivial example is avoiding stress-inducing relationships. Let’s face it, some relationships are just stressful. Sometimes the benefits of the relationship the stress and other costs, and there are cases in which you’re duty-bound to maintain the relationship, as with family. But there are discretionary relationships that are toxic, the stress of the relationship simply isn’t worth it. In these cases, avoiding the stress by avoiding or terminating the relationship may be the best thing to do.
Coping involves dealing with stress when it occurs, which it will. The basic idea behind coping is to take steps to alleviate the stress. (I’m planning a couple of episodes on coping, including next week’s show.) In some respects, the Stoics were the masters of coping through their dichotomy of control. Basically, the dichotomy of control means that some things are under your control and some things (most things, actually) are not. Your own thoughts, beliefs, and actions are under your control, but things outside of you, like the actions of others and external events, are not. The key of applying the dichotomy of control to coping is in recognizing that worrying about things you can’t control isn’t going to do ANY GOOD AT ALL. It’s pointless. So, you focus your energy on things you can control. You can engage in problem solving, seek assistance, or reframe the stressful situation as an opportunity for growth.
Let me give you a very real example of applying the PAC model (very real for those of us who live in the Louisiana woods), storm stress. Here in north Louisiana we have a lot of storms. In the summer and fall, we can get hurricanes and tropical storms, in the spring, we get tremendous thunderstorms and tornadoes, in the winter, we get ice storms. Yep, we’ve got all four seasons covered. It’s always something down here. One of the most stressful situations I’ve gone through in the last few years was dealing with an almost week-long power outage after Hurricane Laura, which hit our area in late August of 2020. August in Louisiana is hot and horribly humid. Without going into details, we had multiple problems, including a malfunctioning generator. It was bad … and stressful. So, what could I do? Well, I thought I was prepared by having a generator, and we were prepared by having lots of water, batteries, flashlights and lanterns, and battery powered fans, which were a HUGE help. These were things I COULD control, and did through our preparation. So as I thought through potential storm-related stressors, I realized that I couldn’t change the fact that the storm hit us hard, and we lost power. That was an external event that happened, and I couldn’t go back and make it not happen, I had to deal with the reality of the situation. I coped by problem-solving and assistance seeking. I solved part of the heat problem by getting a hotel room WITH A/C for Tracy, her mother, and the pups, and sought assistance from our wonderful neighbors, who found us another generator. Avoidance really wasn’t an option, although we could move, I suppose. If we lived on the coast, we could have engaged in some wise avoidance by evacuating. After the hurricane and its effects passed, I replaced the generator with a very sweet whole-house generator and bought a backup generator … just in case.
You probably have similar examples from your own life. If you’d like to share, email me at livewellandflourish@pm.me or go to livewellandflourish.com and use the “contact Craig” button in the upper left-hand corner. I’d love to hear more about your experiences with stress and coping.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about practical wisdom. Because of this, it occurred to me that preparation, avoidance, and coping all involve applying practical wisdom to the problem of stress. In fact, practical wisdom is at the core of the PAC model; this approach is all about applying practical wisdom. Using the PAC model requires understanding your circumstances, making ethically and morally sound, healthy decisions for stress management, and continuously learning. (Like learning to have a backup generator and good relationships with your neighbors!). Managing stress through the PAC model also calls for self-awareness, discipline, resilience, and the courage to sometimes make difficult decisions.
“Prepare” requires an understanding of potential future situations, the foresight to recognize potential stressors, and the discipline to take steps to prepare for these stressors. These all kind of work together. The understanding of possible future situations includes identifying potential stressors and the discipline to go through the work of thinking through potential situations and stressors.
“Avoid” implies having the practical wisdom to understand your own limitations, the nature of stressors to which you are especially susceptible, and the ability to make choices that minimize exposure to unnecessary stress. One good way to do this is to learn the art of saying “no.” By learning to say “no” you avoid stressors, such as being overcommitted. (Yikes! I really need to practice what I preach here.)
Coping involves having the practical wisdom to make well-reasoned decisions when problem solving. In fact, you could say that practical wisdom is at the core of problem-solving. Being ethical and moral is also important to practical wisdom, so applying practical wisdom will lead you towards solutions that are not only effective, they’re also moral. Practical wisdom also drives you to think about your long-term well-being, which pushes you towards adaptive coping strategies that will not only help in the short-term, but will also remove the long-term causes of stress.
So, the key to managing stress is to apply practical wisdom through the PAC model. So, how can you do that? Well, here are three things you can do this week to use your practical wisdom to prepare for, avoid, and cope with stress.
Three things
The first thing I recommend is to do a stressor inventory. Spend 15 to 20 minutes brainstorming things that either cause you stress currently or may cause stress in the future. The list of potential stressors is almost endless; it can include relatively minor things like your morning commute, or major issues such as serious illness. One good way to start building your inventory is to write down broad categories of stressors. Here’s a list of common categories:
- Work-related stressors might be job insecurity, heavy workloads, lack of control, and office politics
- Personal and social stressors include relationship problems, death or illness of a loved one, and social isolation, among others
- Examples of financial stressors include debt, extraordinary expenses, financial insecurity, and these days, dealing with increasing costs of living.
- Health-related stressors could include things like chronic illness or pain, physical disability, mental health issues, and challenges with aging (I feel that last one more and more every day!)
- Life changes such as moving, career changes, retirement, and empty nest syndrome can also be significant stressors.
- Finally, environmental stressors include factors such as living in an unsafe area, natural disasters, and even noise pollution or a lack of access to nature.
Don’t spend too much time filtering at this point. If a stressor comes to mind, write it down.
Once you have your inventory, go through the stressors and rate each one on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how stressful you find it, or how stressful you think it would be. Then, go through the list and rate how likely each stressor is to occur. If it’s already occurring, rate how likely it is to recur in the future. Pick no more than four stressors that are both highly likely to bring about stress, and are likely to occur in the future. This is going to be your list for the third step.
After you have your list of your most critical stressors, apply the PAC model. How can you prepare for the stressor? For example, if financial insecurity is likely to cause you significant stress, you might carefully go through your spending habits to see what you can cut expenses, then use that savings to build up an emergency fund. Can you avoid some stressors? Traffic stresses me out pretty badly, so I wake up early and get to campus before traffic gets bad. (I pass three schools on my commute, so timing is critical.) If you’re already experiencing a stressor, then you need to cope with it. Three useful coping strategies are problem-solving, assistance seeking, and cognitive reframing. I’ll talk more about these and other useful coping strategies in an upcoming episode.
I’m going to give you a fourth suggestion. Learn to say no. Overwork is a major cause of stress, and learning to appropriately say no is a way to reduce your workload. I’m saying this as much for my own benefit as yours, but it’s something that many of us need to work on. I’ll have to think about an episode on saying no gracefully.
Closing
Hans Selye, the founder of stress theory, give us our closing quote, “It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.” Hopefully, the PAC model will help you better manage stress so that it’s less detrimental to your flourishing.
