Many stressful situations are encountered in life. However, stressful situations are not limited to negative life events. Positive life events that require a person to change or adapt in order to meet his or her needs also cause stress.
To briefly explain the sources of stress:
Change; Most people prefer to have order, continuity and predictability in their lives. Therefore, a good or bad event that may lead to a change in your life causes stress.
Daily troubles; It is defined by Lazarus as minor annoyances, irritations and obstacles. Daily troubles that seem relatively small also cause stress and accumulate over time, revealing the stress they trigger.
In this way, both large and small environmental events and situations create stress because they lead to feelings of pressure, frustration, conflict and anxiety.
Print; It occurs when there is a feeling of necessity to increase the pace, intensify or change the direction of behavior or to perform to a higher standard. Internal pressure occurs when a person pushes himself to meet his own standard of perfection and can be constructive or destructive. In addition, trying to realize the expectations of the environment also forces the person.
Frustration; It is the feeling that occurs when a person is prevented from achieving his goal. When a person experiences some kind of obstacle in a matter, he can look for other ways to achieve his goal or settle for as much as he can.
Conflict; It occurs when two or more incompatible desires, opportunities, needs, or goals are encountered at the same time and can never be completely resolved. You may have to give up some of your goals, change them, postpone pursuing them, or not attempt to achieve them all. Lewin defines conflict in terms of two opposing tendencies: approach and avoidance. When both goals are attractive, approach-avoidance conflict occurs; when neither of them seems positive, avoidance-avoidance conflict occurs; when both goals are attractive and repulsive, approach-avoidance conflict occurs.
Stress created by the person himself; person Acting with the idea that "I should always be perfect under all circumstances" can be exemplified by beliefs such as "if everything does not go the way I want, it will be a disaster" or "everyone should love and appreciate me for what I do".
Coping with Stress
Individual differences in perceiving and reacting to events that may cause stress are factors in differences in coping with stress. The amount of stress experienced depends in part on how the situation is interpreted. There are many factors that determine whether a particular situation will be stressful or not.
In addition, as a result of research, the common feature of people who can handle stress better is called psychological resilience. Study; It indicates that reactions to stress depend in part on whether people believe they have some control over events or whether they feel helpless.
The adaptation required by stress is divided into two types of adaptation called direct and defensive coping. Direct coping refers to any behavior undertaken to change a distressing situation. Defensive coping, on the other hand, refers to different ways people convince themselves that they are not really threatened or that they do not really want what they cannot get.
Confrontation, compromise or retreat in order to deal directly with threatening, frustrated or conflict situations. There are three basic options for withdrawal.
Confrontation; The stressful situation is acknowledged, the problem is confronted, and efforts are increased to achieve the goal. Compromise; In dealing directly with the conflict or frustration, a more realistic solution or goal can be decided, some of the things desired can be given up, or efforts can be made to make the other party give up some of the things they want. Withdrawal is withdrawing from the environment when other coping methods do not work for the source of stress.
Defensive coping is the coping method used in cases where the source of stress cannot be identified or cannot be dealt with directly. People use defensive mechanisms as a way of coping defensively. They apply to their systems. In this way, it is possible to cope with unbearable stress.
Main defense mechanisms used in defensive coping:
The most common defense mechanism is denial; It is the refusal to accept a painful or threatening truth. While denial is a positive behavior in some situations, it is a negative behavior in others.
The repression defense mechanism is a type of forgetting that removes painful thoughts from consciousness. In denial, situations that cannot be handled are erased, and in suppression, unacceptable thoughts are erased.
Projection is a defense mechanism where a person attributes repressed thoughts and feelings to someone else. Unaccepted emotions are attributed to someone else, thus the source of the conflict is located outside the person.
In the identification defense mechanism, the opposite of the reflection defense mechanism is seen. By taking on someone else's characteristics, that person's achievements are shared with them in the same way, and the person overcomes feeling inadequate.
The regression defense mechanism is to return to childish behavior and defenses.
In the intellectualization defense mechanism, the person isolates his problems. By analyzing it at a thought level, he keeps himself away from his feelings about the problems by thinking about his problems as if they were the problems of all people.
In the defense mechanism of developing a counter reaction, the person expresses his exaggerated thoughts and feelings, which are the exact opposite of his repressed beliefs or feelings.
Displacement defense mechanism is the directing of repressed motives and emotions from the original objects to other objects that can replace them.
Sublimation defense mechanism is the transformation of repressed motives and emotions into more socially acceptable forms.
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Any defense mechanism can be described as maladaptive if it merely hinders a person's ability to function or creates more problems than it solves.
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