How to Manage Stress

Objective: You will learn to handle the demands and pressures of modern life, thereby lowering your stress level, without compromising your effectiveness or productivity. You will acquire techniques that do this while actually enhancing your performance. Using cognitive-behavioral techniques and guided imagery, we teach you practical strategies that keep pressures on the outside where they belong, so that they are never internalized. Using these strategies leaves you physically and emotionally healthier, more productive and better able to manage the real stressors which threaten your well-being.

Program Outline:

Understanding Stress
• Evolutionary development of physical response
• Neurology of stress
• Stress as an adaptive mechanism
• Stress as a maladaptive response in modern life

Understanding Stressful Situations
• Primitive stressors
• Modern stressors
• Avoiding the biological trap
• Remembering who you are
• The "big ape" or your boss/client

Developing A Picture Of Your Stressors
• What gets to you
• Why it gets to you
• How to recognize inappropriate stressors

How To Win By Letting Go
• Martial arts and the use of an opponent's force against him
• Chess vs. football: know the game you are playing
• The isotonic trap: how to avoid it

Practical Stress reduction Exercises
• Why "relax" is inadequate
• Three methods of stress reduction
• Brief techniques to remind your muscles to relax

Creating An Action Plan To Manage Stressors
• Examination of areas of particular difficulty
• Examination of resistance

Individual and group programs are available. Group programs start with a five-hour session; advanced courses are available. All participants will receive a stress reduction audio tape. Copies of Imagine Yourself Well can be purchased at a reduced price.