How to Get a Grip

"You are a real foul weather friend," my friend, Sarah, said one cold and rainy night in our first year of college. She was having boyfriend troubles and I was listening. I may not have been her first choice, but since I was the only psychology major, in a group of engineers, I was the guy who most likely to get it. In the end, I didn't have much useful advice to offer, beyond being a good listener, but Sarah seemed much happier when she left. I realized, often just talking about our problems with someone we trust helps us get through rough times. Over the past 25 years as a psychologist, I have found helping others feel understood and normalizing their challenges can go a long way toward reducing stress. We've all had those days, weeks, or months when we've felt stressed out and benefitted from a shoulder to cry on or vent to. Unfortunately, the reason we're stressed doesn't just go away after we've blown off steam, by ourselves or with a nearby listener. We can change our attitude about the stress but that doesn't change the source of the stress. While it may be true that our attitudes shape our actions, we still need to take those actions to reduce our stress and that takes something more. I am generally positive about positive affirmations, but I think it is important to put some muscle behind our desire to feel better. We need tools to help us realize that we're not powerless in how we respond to the situations we are in. This book is my attempt to give you those tools. One of the challenging aspects of giving advice about coping with stress is that there is no single cause of it. Some things are universal, like “illness is stressful” and some are specific to only us, “why is my friend Dan ghosting me?” What is stressful for one person could be invigorating for someone else. One person's hobby is another person's catastrophe. We also have our own ways of dealing with stress. Some people manage stress by actively taking on the source while others hunker down and wait it out. Some techniques encourage others to help us, and many others are unseen, or unrecognized, by those around us. Given that we each have our own version of what stresses us out and our own set of skills for how we deal with it, there can never be a one-size-fits-all strategy for managing stressful events in our lives. Another challenge with writing a book on stress management is that the sources of stress change over time and from place to place. Stress has certainly always been, and always will be a part of life, but the stress of what it was like to live in the 1800's was certainly different than what it is today. So too are the sources of stress different in the cities from what they are in the country, or in resource rich countries as compared to countries with fewer resources. Over the years that I have been writing this book, I have been following a stress survey put out by the American Psychological Association. They have done a survey for years that tracked what the top causes of stress are in America. In 2009, the survey (American Psychological Association (2009). Stress in America: Mind/Body Health: For a Healthy Mind and Body, Talk to a Psychologist, Stress in America™ Survey™) found the top five stressors to be money (71%), work (69%), the economy (63%), family responsibilities (55%), and relationships (51%). Fast forward 10 years the survey showed the top source of stress were mass shootings (71%), access and cost of health care (71% for people with private insurance and 53% for people with public insurance), acts of terrorism (60%), the natural climate (56%), and the political climate (56%) (American Psychological Association (2019). Stress in America: Stress and Current Events. Stress in America™ Survey). Just one year later, the focus of our stress shifted again about the coronavirus pandemic itself (78%) and overall stress was increased for most Americans (67%), followed by health care (66%), mass shootings (62%) and climate change/global warming (55%), and the rise in suicide rates (51%) (American Psychological Association (2020). Stress in America™ 2020: A National Mental Health Crisis). The surveys show that there is no fixed set of stressors in our lives. The sources are different for different people, and they change over time in keeping with the events surrounding us. It should be noted that those surveys only captured the stress of the people who took the time to respond to the questions. We may never know the true depth and breadth of what causes stress in the lives of all Americans, or other people throughout the world. We may all get caught up in the current hot-button issues grabbing the headlines but that is not going to stay the same for long. How can Get a Grip help? The chapters in this book are focused on specific skills, techniques, and mindsets designed to help you manage your stress. The examples will be related to specific stressors, like job changes and health crises, but the techniques could be applied to any stressful challenge, including ones I have not even thought of. These concepts have arisen out of my experiences working over the years with many different people in many different settings, so my hope is that you will be able to make use of them no matter what your particular struggle point is.