COPING EFFECTIVELY MENTAL AND emotional stress cannot be
eliminated from life.
Nor does it have to be. In itself it is not harmful. It
is not a disease but a normal part of life. It is not so much the amount of
stress an individual is subjected to that determines whether he or she will
suffer from acute anxiety or depression or psychosomatic illness as it is how
the stress is perceived, understood, and handled. And there are measures we can
make use of to handle stressful situations in our lives more effectively.
There can, of course, be situations that seem so
overwhelming that we may need medical or other professional help if we are to
cope with them. Such help, as the next chapter will show, is available. But for
most situations we have resources of our own that we can learn to use
successfully.
HANDLING FEELINGS OF FRUSTRATION
When we have worries and cannot do anything about them, we
have feelings of frustration. Long continued, frustration can take serious
physical toll. In a classic experiment demonstrating the physical effects of
frustration, rats were strapped to a board-for them, a most frustrating
situation. As they struggled uselessly to get out of the situation, large areas
of their heart muscles disintegrated and the animals died. Obviously, the one
way to have saved the rats would have been to release them. Medication might
conceivably have dulled the frustration for them but not released them. Man's
frustrating situations are not so obvious.
But they can be no less exacting.
And while there is often a temptation to regard them as insoluble and to dull
the feelings they arouse by such means as drugs and alcohol, man's frustrating
situations quite often can be solved.
There is usually something that can be done to adapt to the
circumstance or to change the seeming circumstance. If, say, your job is a
particularly frustrating one, must it remain so? Is the frustration
irremovable? There are many cases like that of a man, a successful young executive,
or so he had been, who became a victim of painful headaches and insomnia and
began to have trouble with associates on the job and with family at home.
He
had recently been assigned to a responsible new position in a division of the
company that was in trouble. He worked hard and yet couldn't make as much of a
dent in the many problems the division faced as he thought desirable.
Increasingly anxious and tense, he put pressure on the people working with him
as well as on himself, to the point where he no longer had their cooperation.
He had a gnawing, ever growing fear that his superiors were
dissatisfied with his work. Only when he faced up to the fact that it was this
fear which was driving him and, at the same time, was frustrating him, making
him act in a self-defeating fashion, could he nerve himself for a showdown with
the company president. It was a productive showdown.
Was the president
dissatisfied with his work, he wanted to know. On the contrary, the president
told him, he thought he had done remarkably well in a difficult situation. And,
in fact, so concerned was the president over the possible loss of the young man
that he insisted he take an immediate vacation and promised to assign
additional personnel to help him in his work. If you feel you are faltering in
your job, that you are out of your depth, it mayor may not be true. It's
healthy to find out where you stand, to take action rather than suffer along.
You may not be out of your depth at all but may have created frustration for
yourself by demanding more of yourself than anybody could reasonably expect. If
you are out of your depth, the chances are that this will be discovered by
others sooner or later; and if you own up to it sooner, there may be something
of an immediate wrench but you will save yourself much grief and may well find
yourself a happier situation much sooner.
