p.3 stress is a demand made upon the adaptive capacities of the mind and body...
if we want to understand stress, we must look both at external demands (what are they, and how can they be
increased or lessened as required?) and at out personal capacities (how do we react to stress, and how can
our reactions be modified as necessary?).
p.4 any person under stress must look firstly at the environment, to identify the demands
that are being made upon him or her and to see whether these demands can be altered or lessened in any way, and secondly
at him or herself to see whether personal reactions to these demands can be similarly modified, thus either
increasing capacity or making better use of what capacity is already available... Stress is a natural and unavoidable
feature of life.
p.26-27 We can make up our minds to take constructive action [in the face of stress]... Mobilisation
is the simple decision that something must be done... Having mobilised, we need to understand what it is we're mobilising
against. This is done by asking ourselves the questions "What are my stressors?", "What needs to be done about them?"
and "What is stopping me from doing it?"... The final stage is to take action... we may have to ignore (or adapt to)
the stressor rather than take action about it.
p.27 let's move to the knowledge stage, and start by making a precise list of the
things that are pressuring us... In a stress-reduction programme, there's little help to be gained through
generalising.
p.45-46 When asked to make a list of his work-related stressors, [33-year old social worker] Peter
doubted at first whether this was possible. He argued that the stress of his job was so general and all-pervasive
that he couldn't really isolate individual things. However he agreed to try, and quickly became enthusiastic about the task.
He found that if he thought hard enough about it, he was able to see that his job wasn't one big
stressor after all, but a collection of small stressors, some of relatively minor importance in themselves, but which added
together represented a formidable amount of pressure... Breaking things down into individual stress components
helped him to see things as more manageable, and to feel in consequence more positive and optimistic about his ability
to cope.
