Holistic Interventions

As we have already mentioned in Part One, the goal of stress management is not to eliminate all stress. That would be unrealistic. The aim of stress management interventions is to teach participants to manage their stress. In other words, we should aim to achieve optimum levels of stress. When we achieve optimum levels of stress we experience eustress.

Many stress management programmes primarily address stress symptoms. While symptomatic relief is helpful, it does not go far enough. Let us imagine that you are experiencing anger regularly. Going to the gym and getting exercise is an excellent way to alleviate the symptom anger (and in part 2 of this guide we will be telling how effective exercise is for stress). We need to appreciate, however, that addressing the symptom alone does not get to the root cause of your anger. We will return to this topic a little later.

Click here to view a video on how to cope with stress.

Holistic Interventions (Also Called Mind/Body Medicine) Emphasise The Following:

• A holistic view of mind, body and spirit.
• Recent research conducted at leading universities, such as Harvard, Stanford, UCLA and Johns Hopkins in America, recognise that we should use our minds to better our health and, in the process, lower stress levels.
• Stress is influenced by interrelated factors: genetics, family and socio-economic background, life style factors including sleep, diet, exercise, social support, emotions, perception, life skills, risk taking behaviour and spiritual factors amongst others.
• Any movement towards health in one sphere of the psyche positively influence other potentials of the body. For instance, if a person begins to exercise, he may feel more socially confident, might spontaneously change eating habits, thus improving her overall physical and emotional health. Please see unit 3 for more in-depth discussion of the spiritual/spiritual approach to health and stress.
• The mind/body system has its own healing capabilities. The body has its own natural tendency to move towards health and balance (homeostasis/equilibrium).
• While stress underlies almost all illness – the good news is that stress management skills can be taught.
• Like all things worthwhile a new lifestyle and effective stress management skills take time (usually six months), commitment and dedication. Once new lifestyle habits are in place most people experience dramatic reductions in their stress levels and improved levels of health and wellbeing.
• The individual must play an active role in dealing with stress/ illness. People need to recognise that stress and ill health and wellbeing needs to be managed. We need to become our own health managers. Once we learn how to manage our health we begin to experience internal locus of control and self-efficacy (self-empowerment).
• Interventions – stress management workshop – elicit the body’s healing powers.