Dr. Pat will be giving free one-hour talks on a variety of counselling and psychology topics at Myriad Psychology Centre in Cochrane.
The first talk is entitled ‘A Game Plan for Managing Stress’ and will be held from 7 to 8 pm on Tuesday, August 20th.
In this talk, I will discuss tips to help you with one of the most common issues my clients ask me for help with: How to manage stress.
Although managing stress may seem like a challenging task, it can be done effectively if you keep in mind that there are two categories of strategies. These two categories are problem-focused strategies and self-focused strategies.
Problem-focused strategies involve taking action to reduce or eliminate sources of stress from your life. These include problems and stressors at work or school, relationship issues, financial difficulties, tasks that you need to complete, challenging events you need to prepare for, and hassles you face on a daily or regular basis such as household chores and commuting.
The second category of strategies to manage stress is self-focused. Self-focused strategies involve using skills and activities to improve your emotional reaction to sources of stress. There are three kinds of self-focused strategies—behavioural, physical and cognitive.
Behavioural self-focused strategies involve making time for pleasurable activities to give yourself a break from thinking about your problems in order to recharge your emotional batteries. Physical self-focused strategies entail practicing skills to calm your body when you are feeling tense. Cognitive self-focused strategies use help you reduce the emotional impact of problems and stressors by changing how you think about them.
During this talk, I will discuss how you can use the winning combination of problem-focused and self-focused strategies as part of your game plan to manage stress.