10 Most Common Stress Triggers | Emotional & Stress Management slideshows | Emotional & Mental Health center

Work And Stress

If there is anything that makes most people stress out it, it is stress related to the job. If you are the boss, you can de-stress your job by choosing people who are knowledgeable, available, and present on the job--and then let them do their job. You provide the structure, they attend to the details. If your stressor is your boss, then find aspects of your job that you can control and emphasize them in your daily routine. Look for assignments that have longer deadlines, and then aim to complete them well ahead of time. The broader your time span of discretion, the lower your stress.

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Photo courtesy of Alan Cleaver by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/2581218229/
www.helpguide.org/mental/stress_signs.htm

Financial Troubles

Since 2007, tens of millions of American families along with families around the world have endured severe financial stress. Even if you have been doing everything right, your financial affairs may have gone horribly wrong, and now that the economy is improving, you may be haunted by the thought "if only I had hung in there" long enough to recover your losses. More than any other single financial factor, debt increases stress. People who have high debt loads are more likely to have heart attacks, more likely to suffer depression, and more likely to report that they experience generally bad health. Getting out of debt is often the best thing you can do to reduce your stress.

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Photo courtesy of stuartpilbrow by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/stuartpilbrow/2942333106/
Sweet E, Nandi A, Adam EK, McDade TW. The high price of debt: Household financial debt and its impact on mental and physical health. Soc Sci Med. 2013 Aug. 91:94-100. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.05.009. Epub 2013 May 16.

Problems In Primary Relationships

Problems with your spouse or your significant other can be an unrelenting source of stress. Nearly all couples overestimate their future stability and happiness when they are first starting out. Typically about four years into a relationship, there is a realization that part of "for better or worse" is "worse," and, depending on the self-esteem the partners brought to their marriage or long-term romance, both the relationship and the partners may experience varying degrees of success. Realizing that no relationship is perfect is a start--but it is essential to realize that fault almost never is entirely on just one side.

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Lavner JA, Karney BR, Bradbury TN. Newlyweds' Optimistic Forecasts of Their Marriage: For Better or for Worse? J Fam Psychol. 2013 Jun 24. [Epub ahead of print].

Major Life Changes

Major life changes, whether happy or unhappy, add to the stress in our lives. The birth of a child, for instance, is a joyous event, but every parent who cannot afford a live-in nanny knows that the bundle of joy brings an entirely new level of stress to the parents. Marriage is stressful, and so is divorce. Getting a job is stressful, as is losing one. How well we respond to stress tends to depend on how we worked out stressful situations earlier in our lives. People who had overwhelmingly stressful events during childhood, or who have responsibility without independent authority in adulthood, tend to experience greater stress. The key to overcoming stress tends to be finding a support group that doesn't require unwavering obedience, or as the song says, "We gotta' have friends."

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Shapero BG, Black SK, Liu RT, Klugman J, Bender RE, Abramson LY, Alloy LB. Stressful Life Events and Depression Symptoms: The Effect of Childhood Emotional Abuse on Stress Reactivity. J Clin Psychol. 2013 Jun 25. doi: 10.1002/jclp.22011. [Epub ahead of print].

Pessimism

Some people are pessimists because they take a doggedly literal view of life. They don't want to indulge in airy-fairy magical thinking, so they always expect the worst. The problem with expecting the worst from the world is that usually the world finds a way of living down to your expectations. When pessimists become miserable enough, and want to change their world view, they can actually learn to become optimists. How can you do that? Don't deny your disappointments, but don't dwell on them, either. Suspend judgment long enough to enjoy the here and now, regardless of what your expectations for the future may be.

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Photo courtesy of Kevin McShane by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/lobraumeister/3078421978/
Rister, Robert S. Learning Optimism: A Surprising Way To Overcome Pessimism. SteadyHealth, 27 May 2013.

Needing To Slow Down

Living life in the fast lane is another source of stress. A fast-paced life is not necessarily a bad thing, but both eustress ("good stress") and distress ("bad stress") can simply wear a person out. Keeping up a frenetic pace can literally "burn out" the adrenal glands. The adrenal cortex at first overproduces the stress hormone cortisol, and then as feedback loops turn into constant stimulation of the gland, it eventually stops producing enough cortisol. The result is a crash from which it can take a very long time to recover physically, emotionally, socially, and financially, when people never take time out from their stressors, whether good or bad.

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Photo courtesy of Ryan T. Watson by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/crunchynut93/6649894371/
Rister, Robert S. Healing without Medication (Laguna Beach: Basic Health Publications, 2003).

Negative Self-Talk

Many of us stress ourselves out with negative self-talk. Thinking some variation of "Things are terrible" or "This just has to turn out bad" quickly leads to emotional upset and stress with all their attendant disabilities, including greater susceptiblity to infections, headache, fatigue, poorer job performance, family problems, and social isolation. You don't have to become a pollyanna to overcome negative self-talk, but you do need to learn to see positive and negative aspects of situations in balance, as they are, not with a magnifying glass on the negative. Avoid catastrophizing, looking for negative outcomes, and polarizing, supposing that good and bad are "either-or."

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Mayo Clinic Health. Positive thinking: Reduce stress by eliminating negative self-talk. Accessed 8 August 2013.

Low Self-Esteem

Psychological studies consistenly find that people who have low self-esteem suffer greater stress when things go wrong. Low self-esteem generally originates in childhood, when the child has bad experiences and no tools for taking control over them. The remedy for low self-esteem is taking charge of your life. That's easier said than done, but here are some specific suggestions. Look for aspects of your situation that can be managed over the long run. If you can't get your act together today, maybe you can get it together by tomorrow. Practice a sense of balance. No situation is totally good or totally bad. Look at both good and bad. And don't put people on pedestals. It's not fair to them, and it's not healthy for you.

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Photo courtesy of Gisela Giardino by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/gi/105903652/
Ewart CK, Elder GJ, Laird KT, Shelby GD, Walker LS. Can Agonistic Striving Lead to Unexplained Illness? Implicit Goals, Pain Tolerance, and Somatic Symptoms in Adolescents and Adults. Health Psychol. 2013 Jul 29. [Epub ahead of print].

Perfectionism

The need for things to be just so leads to endless stress in all aspects of life. Perfectionism is associated with stress, anxiety, and eating disorders. The aspect of perfectionism that causes the greatest emotional discomfort is doubt. As long as you are striving for perfection and reasonably you will attain your goal, you might be seen as having OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) or as neurotic, but you probably won't be suffering a great deal of stress. Problems with stress kick in when you are striving for some pre-determined vision of perfection and you don't know whether your efforts are worth your while--so focus on doing things that you know are worth your while.

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Photo courtesy of an Usher by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/ush/1048242527/
Luo J, Forbush KT, Williamson JA, Markon KE, Pollack LO. How specific are the relationships between eating disorder behaviors and perfectionism? Eat Behav. 2013 Aug. 14(3):291-4. doi: 10.1016/j.eatbeh.2013.04.003. Epub 2013 May 15.

Unrealistic Expectations

The road to hell is paved with unrealistic expectations, a sage of psychology might say. Unreleastic expectations that cause a mismatch between efforts and goals is a major source of stress, with devastating effects on self-esteem. The remedy for unrealistic expectations is better information. In a sense, we get smarter by virtue of our bad experiences, and our wasted efforts. The key to making progress in life is not to repeat our mistakes. Beware of con artists, snake oil peddlers, and gurus of all kinds. Don't let another person set your expectations for you. Everyone has to find the balance between risk and reward, but the secret to self-esteem is to take smaller risks for reasonable rewards, experiencing a mixture of success and correctable failure as you go along.