Stress Control

People wonder whether it is possible to influence stress situations and to control them. Before answering this question it is necessary to decide which sort of stress requires control. Hans Selye, a Canadian scientist who invented the term "stress", offered a differentiation between "distress" and "eustress". The first is harmful for human health. The second is a good companion in any productive activity and presents no danger. It is closely linked with efforts to overcome difficulties, to solve routine and professional problems. Distress begins as a result of refusing to try and solve difficult situations in life. Distress must be controlled.

Outside factors or information which cause stress are divided into physical and psychic. The first, with the exception of gravitational and climatic fluctuations or injuries, rarely lead to distress. Distress is mainly caused by conflicts between the requirements and wishes of a person and the possibility of meeting or fulfilling them. Normally they are associated with outward obstacles or the resistance and counteractions of other people. Moreover, they are more frequently associated with the fact that the requirements of a person run counter to the requirements of other people, and the person in question fails to find a compromising solution within his or her internal conflict. This happens, for example, when we can attain a goal only on the condition that it leads, it would seem to us, to a loss of self-respect or respect of our environment.

In most cases distress originates due to a lack of communication culture and inadequate perception. If not, then due to the inability to understand the desires and wishes of other people and coordinate them with our own.

There is no doubt that the best preventive treatment of psychic and emotional stress is correct upbringing and higher standards of communication culture. This is a difficult task which takes a long time. It does not exclude more concrete efforts aimed at increasing individual resistance to stress by those who are already in need of it.

Until recently, various means of reducing emotional tension were used in the "struggle against stress". These means include medical preparations (tranquilizers) and numerous forms of relaxation, from self-suggestion to self-regulation techniques used by Yoga. Correct regime and diet are also important.

The reduction of emotional tension which has caused distress does not lead to adaptation. It only can, at the most, help develop a more sensible view of the situation that has given rise to the stress. However, if there is no other cure, there will be no real stress control and the adaptation is temporary. As a rule, as soon as a patient stops taking medicine and gives up self-suggestion, the unpleasant sensations return. It is clear why: in the early stages of the "struggle against stress", the patient tried to solve his problems rationally by himself, "with a cool head", but lost this ability precisely because he was unable to cope with the situation. Calm achieved with the help of tranquilizers and relaxation just brings him back to the stage he has already passed.

Radically solving the problems demands more than a cool head. It calls for changing the strategy of solving the problem, of revaluating all the values, of developing a fundamentally new approach to the concrete situation, life in general, and oneself as an individual. None of the above-mentioned methods can help achieve such a state. Only such ability can guarantee a resistance to stress in the future.

In order to understand what such an approach implies we have to go back to the conditions that created "insoluble" conflicts.

The refusal to find a solution and the condition of distress arise when and where a person fails to see a way out of an impasse, fails to find a means of solving conflicts within himself or contradictions with external conditions. However, objectively situations are rarely really insoluble. In the majority of cases they are qualified like this from a subjective point of view. Even when events in one's life seem fatal, the person in question still has a chance to reconsider his attitude to these events, and minimize their significance. Such a reassessment of the situation, helped by different methods of psychotherapy, amounts to the ability to see new aspects of the situation, and to understand what a relatively modest place the conflict occupies in the infinitely rich world of human emotions and relations. In this understanding a great role is played by warm-hearted human relations and human concern, and one of the chief tasks of psychotherapeutists is to form such relations with their patients and between the patients and people surrounding them — at home and at work, and at the beginning among patients themselves. In Russia, and in other countries, group psychotherapy occupies an increasing place. In its process patients are brought together by reciprocal sympathies and common worries.

To develop a broad, unbiased and flexible attitude to problems, contacts with art and literature are indispensable. The greatest works of literature reflect the world and life in all their aspects. People who have read about them are already protected in a way from a narrow and unproductive approach to events. This is why art as a "cure" is regarded as one of the most promising methods of preventing and removing stress.

An active position in life, active perception of art, developing taste, personal participation in everything that contributes to broadening horizons and increasing physical and intellectual abilities — all this is a prerequisite for stress resistance and for effective individual efforts in shifting distress to eustress, unless the first has assumed an absolute character. In the latter case medical aid is necessary. The task of medicine is to achieve control over stress and to turn it from a force of destruction into a creative force.

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