Stress Coping Styles - How Do You Do You?

Our stress coping style is a relatively permanent, individual-specific way of facing difficulties in stressful situations (Tomczak et al, 2013).

Endler and Parker (1999) distinguish three stress coping styles:

1. Task orientated

2. Emotion orientated

3. Avoidance orientated

Task-oriented coping =

Preferring to focus attention on the problem being solved.

This style seeks the cognitive transformation of a difficult situation through taking action or making plans that contribute to solving the problem.

Emotion-orientated coping =

This style aims to reduce distress by concentrating on oneself and one’s emotions (anger, tension, sense of guilt).

Cathartically processing emotion is believed to bring intuitive insights into what is felt to be the correct interpretation of events.

Avoidance-orientated coping style =

This style reduces the distress of a difficult situation by avoiding thinking about the stressor or the experience of stress.

The avoidance-orientated strategy is broken down into two techniques :

Distraction and Social Diversion.

Despite situational variables, the probability of one of these specific behaviour styles increases with the intensity of the personality trait non-conformity.

Can you guess which one?

Conclusive research reveals that as non-conformity increases so too does task-orientated coping, whilst emotion-orientated coping decreases (Bernacka et al, 2016).

Non-conformity can be understood as a set of interrelated traits:

Self-esteem, activeness, courage, resilience, perseverance, independence and tolerance.

Non-conformity is expressed in personality as a type of motivation. It is an energetic force driven to liberate, organise and determine the direction of activity (Bernacka, 2009).

Conformists are predisposed to a highly adaptive style.

Meanwhile, non-conformists express themselves in a highly innovative manner.

Learning how our personality intersects with our inclination towards a dominant methodology for problem-solving helps us make better decisions. By remaining curious to how we approach challenges, we can consciously practise alternative contradictory frameworks that open up new possibilities and opportunities for our lives.

How then can we access these potential portals to new perceptions and problem-solving pathways?

Self-reflection is the platform.

Firstly, we must create space to think. We may require professional support to layout the scenario we are struggling with.

Secondly, we need to identify the problem.

When we have identified the perimeter of the problem, we then refocus on what is outside the problem space. This is essential for determining our strengths and identifying where existing resources remain in reserve. These later become our tools for action.

Any limitations or deficits we can then create a sub-design around to service those unmet needs and skills.

Following on from Step two, we review our first impression of the problem space. Is it more malleable than we initially assessed. By having moving into our centred and resourced sense of self in Step Two, our view may well have shifted.

We need to check for cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Is our interpetation of the situation or argument sound, valid or both?

The premises of our thinking may be incorrect.

If our premises are faulty, our thinking may be logical but the conclusion will be false.

Only when both our premises and our logical reasoning is accurate, can we deem our conclusion valid.

Fourthly, we must observe what our predominant coping style has been thus far from the three noted above.

Fifthly, we must evaluate the benefits and costs of that approach.

From there, considering what our ultimate outcome ideally is and imagining what the problem space would look like through time if the alternative two approaches were applied.

The sixth step is selecting the best fit to solving the problem after stepping back from the self-reflection process.

We then assess barriers to change. This may mean practising leaning into the new, and often uncomfortable, attitudes and approaches that would bear us the best opportunity for growth and advancement.

As we move along the solution-focused trajectory, let us remember that anxiety is the average experience of living. It is not saved up for the select few. Likewise, neither is its complement, courage.

Following a strategic process to problem solving quells fear of the unknown, however the only way to extinguish it totally is through action and outcome.

Not all solutions will work, nor work consistently, nor work forever.

Nonetheless, by investing time for self-reflection and planning at the outset, we spend less time back at the drawing board. Our confidence increases as we increasingly develop the tools to track the terrain we are traversing.

As wisely elucidated by Ralph Waldo Emerson -

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better."