Stress management mediating factors

Individual cognitive assessment system, adequately matched social support network, and flexibly callable coping resources. All stress management methods essentially reduce the negative impact of stress sources on individuals by intervening in these three types of mediating variables.

You must have seen this scene: two newcomers in the same department took on an emergency iteration project handed over by their boss and were required to produce three sets of plans within a week. One could happily talk about the product requirements details for a week, but the other started to suffer from insomnia and hair loss in three days. Even if he yawned at work, he was afraid that his boss would see him and think he had a bad attitude. The stress source is obviously the same, but the response is so different because intermediary factors are at work in the middle.

Let’s talk about the most commonly mentioned cognitive evaluation first. Lazarus’ classic cognitive evaluation theory is still the mainstream. Simply put, when you encounter something, you first judge whether it threatens me (primary evaluation), and then judge whether I have the ability to handle it (secondary evaluation). The results of the two evaluations directly determine the amount of pressure you feel. What’s interesting is that in the past two years, there have been many studies in the positive psychology circle that have “refuted” this classic conclusion, saying that not all negative evaluations are bad. I have met a girl who works in e-commerce operations before. Every time she takes on a big promotion project, she writes a “worst-case outcome plan”: the worst is a KPI completion rate of 70%, a bonus of 2,000 yuan will be deducted, and she will not be fired, nor will it affect her promotion next year. Putting the worst-case scenario on the table will make her more able to withstand stress than her colleagues who always think “I must be perfect.” In the past two years, neuroscience research has added a new perspective, saying that people's cognitive evaluation is not that rational at all. When you are hungry, not sleeping enough, or during your menstrual period, neutral events will be judged as "threatening." Therefore, many times you feel stressed because you stayed up late watching TV series the day before. Taking a nap first is more effective than any other psychological construction.

In addition to what you think about yourself, how the people around you treat you actually has a much greater impact than many people think. Many people have misunderstandings about social support. They think that having many friends and caring family members is enough. This is not true. I have seen many people who have a lot of relatives and friends who dare not say anything when something happens. When they say it, they just say "I told you a long time ago that you shouldn't choose this job" and "Does this matter?" This kind of ineffective support will double the pressure. There was an audit visitor who stayed up for a month during the annual review. She called her mother to complain that she was too tired. Her mother replied, "It's okay to be tired. Young people will suffer when they don't endure hardship." She hung up the phone on the spot and squatted in the company stairwell and cried for half an hour. She was just physically tired, but now she even collapsed emotionally. Instead, she casually complained in an industry group that a senior she had never met sent her an audit toolkit she compiled, which saved her at least three days of repeated work and eliminated most of her stress. You see, the matching degree of support is always more important than the quantity. Fellow travelers who can provide you with practical solutions are much more useful than family and friends who only advise you to "think more."

There is another factor that is most easily overlooked and is the most controversial factor between academics and practitioners, which is the available coping resources. When doing research, academics like to control external variables and always attribute coping resources to the individual's internal coping skills. However, those of us who do corporate EAP all know that mindfulness meditation and cognitive adjustment are all in vain in the face of absolute resource gaps. Last year we took on a project for a manufacturing company in the Pearl River Delta. The front-line assembly line workers' self-assessment scores for stress were particularly high. At first, the management refused to spend money to adjust work schedules, so they asked us to provide group psychological counseling to the workers. After two months of doing this, the worker turnover rate did not drop at all. Later, We discussed the table with the management and requested that the rest period of the night shift be adjusted from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, and that a free late-night snack be added. With just two small adjustments, the workers' self-assessed stress scores dropped by 32% after two months, which was more effective than ten sessions of group counseling. To be honest, if you have so much work at hand that you have to do it for 16 hours a day, and you don’t even have time to drink water, it will be useless no matter how you adjust your mind.

Of course, these three factors are inherently intertwined, and no one is absolutely important. If you are not self-conscious and will not blame yourself to death when something happens, you will be more open-minded when asking others for help, and you will have more social support and coping resources. ； On the other hand, if you have enough resources at hand, you will naturally not panic when encountering problems, and your cognitive evaluation will be more positive. There is still a debate in the academic circles about whether individual physiological characteristics should be considered as intermediary factors. For example, some people are born with high vagus nerve tone and can sleep soundly even if the sky falls. Some people are born with high sensitivity and are prone to anxiety at the smallest things. This physiological baseline will indeed affect the stress response. However, because it is difficult to adjust the day after tomorrow, when doing stress management, we generally do not regard it as the core adjustment target. At most, we will recommend sensitive people to sleep more and take time to exercise twice a week. Stabilizing the physiological state first can reduce many unnecessary stress reactions.

In fact, to put it bluntly, stress management is not a chicken soup for the soul that wants you to "become stronger". Next time you feel out of breath, don't rush to scold yourself for poor psychological quality. First, go through these dimensions: Is my judgment on this matter too extreme? Is there anyone knowledgeable who can help? Can you apply to the leader for an extension or add more people, and fill the actual resource gap first? Most of the time, what is crushing you is not the matter itself, but that you did not find the right opening to adjust.