Stress Management and the Rhythms of Our Lives

Abstract

In the context of the crucial issues in counselling, understanding the nature of stress and stress management provides a useful background for understanding more complex issues about fear and anxiety, loss of self-confidence and depression, sudden onrush of aggression/anger, responding to grief and taking to alcohol and drugs. The second reason why understanding stress is important is that stress is a necessary ingredient of normal routine life, but if you understand its logic you are in a position to avoid falling into more serious mental health concerns. Irwin Yalom made the following observation:

The universality of stress is one of the major reasons that scholars encounter such difficulty when they attempt to define and describe normality: the difference between normality and pathology is quantitative and not qualitative.¹