"Elements of Stress Management" printable

Elements of our Stress Management Programs
© 2004, Richard Pinneau, Ph.D.

You know that “hurry up and relax” doesn’t make much sense. Human patterns of stress and strain develop over a lifetime of challenges, struggles and pains, so it takes time to instill a new pattern. Almost all of Dr. Pinneau’s programs therefore divide their attention between four critical components: giving you motivation to learn more flexible and relaxed responses to stress, enhancing your awareness of how you may be responding to stress in less than optimal ways, presenting new skills for responding to stress healthfully and productively, and showing you how to make these new skills into positive new habits that enable you to thrive under stress.

Obviously, you can't be expected to master all four of these components in one of our brief introductory programs. Yet it is possible to experience the benefits of these potent stress management strategies and skills even within one brief, enjoyable presentation. In as little as an hour you learn to take advantage of simple principles you actually already know. Most people don’t realize how to fashion these strategies into effective tools to reduce stress and enhance performance. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how quickly you throw off many of the physical tensions and mental pressures that burden us all.

Motivation to Relax

We want to motivate you to learn to manage stress better, not only for your health, but because...

• Relaxation gives strategic power, mental and physical agility. Tension constrains and constricts.

• Relaxed means confident, resourceful. Worried means distracted, accident-prone, forgetful, inefficient.

Awareness & Alertness

By the time we know we’re stressed out, crises are snowballing and there’s no time to master new skills. So the key to handling stress is to learn these skills before things “hit the fan.”

• Heart pounding? Cold sweat? Nightmares? Depression and fatigue? Back spasms? Angry outbursts?
Everyone knows they’re under stress when symptoms like those start. By then it’s too late!

• Without becoming a hypochondriac you can learn to monitor mental and physical signs of stress
while they’re still manageable; then you regain control over your mind and performance.

• You will learn to employ simple psychological strategies to reduce stress effects on the spot.

Skills & Strategies

Graphics: People automatically use mental images all the time. Use them to enhance performance!

The final word: Mental chatter? Let’s try a different channel: clearer, more focused, more effective.

Inspiration: There’s a reason the nurse has you take a deep breath before the needle — breathing
patterns determine 50% of your stress responses.

The works: Most powerfully, combine all three: proper breathing + powerful images + focused, positive messages.

Habit-building Homework & Humor

Factoid: The greater the stress, the more your old habits (often bad ones) come back.

Strategy: Learn stress-releasing techniques in advance — and make them ready without a thought.

Homework for mastery: Take home some playful strategies for powerful de-stressing tools.

Humor: A sense of humor is vital in the modern world. Laughter is healing, and keeping your sense of humor simply amounts to keeping your perspective! Not easy — but more than worth it!

About the Presenter

Dr. Richard Pinneau received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Michigan, completing his dissertation on how job stress affects employee health. After three years of teaching and research at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, he opened his private practice as the first Stress Management and Biofeedback Center in North Carolina. Since his retirement from private practice, Dr. Pinneau enjoys speaking and consulting for industry nationwide. He is a co-author of Job Demands and Worker Health, published by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.