Skip to content
Technology & Innovation —

Avoid Burnouts By Reframing How You Perceive and Deal With Stress

Sometimes the best way to combat stress is to examine it not as a mysterious toxin but as a tangible, solvable equation.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

Whether you’re a college student balancing homework and extracurriculars or a harried employee juggling job and family, stress can easily become an accepted part of life like lousy weather or gridlocked traffic. Fortunately, it doesn’t have the be that way because unlike rainstorms and rush hour, stress is something you have the ability to grasp and control.

As Paula Davis-Laack at Forbes explains in an article posted earlier this week, a well thought-out strategy for stress management can prevent burnout and the crippling symptoms that come with it. Davis-Laack offers a few tips to help get you started. They include:

1. Steel yourself by increasing your self-efficacy

2. Investigate your stress and determine cause/effect

3. Keep the hope, believe that you can get through it

Davis-Laack’s advice is somewhat cursory but still represents a good starting point for de-stressing. Her second point suggests harnessing a useful method of analysis — introspection. Write out what causes your stress and how the worry manifests itself through (in)action. Think of stress less as an exasperated state and more like a personal equation needing to be balanced. Determine the weight of the equation’s many components through reflection. Be meta. Examine stress as stress. Once you know thy enemy, then you’ll be ready to conquer.

Keep reading at Forbes

Photo credit: Lisa S. / Shutterstock

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
Related
A bearded man wearing glasses and a plaid shirt speaks with a microphone clipped to his collar in front of a purple background with white dots.
The Well
How Rainn Wilson discovered sacredness
The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.
▸
13 min
—
with
Rainn Wilson
Up Next