Take The Pressure On

Staying Calm And Collected In The Face Of Calamity Is Vital. Rebecca Douglas Asks: Can We Learn To Do It Better? 

​​​​LIFE IS FULL OF STRESS – your dental appointment keeps getting rescheduled, Brooklyn Nine-Nine being cancelled and then thankfully not (phew!), and the 43,000 emails in your inbox.

It seems the ability to roll with the blows and keep on truckin' determines how successful you’ll be at navigating modern-day existence. Each person’s tolerance of the varying degrees of life’s strife is different – someone’s Krakatoa is another’s cracking good yarn after a few wines on a Friday night. And while we’d all like to stress less, the most common response to our modern world’s many stressors is to “calm down” and “take a step back”. But it’s not exactly the most helpful advice: if you’ve got three kids and a presentation due in two days, or even just, you know, one of those two things, there’s nothing you can do to “take a step back”. What you need is a more effective stress strategy.

Is it possible, then, to actually increase our ability to handle stress? Research says yes, by not only forming the intention to improve, but also by setting achievable tasks to build your tolerance over time. A study in 2015 concluded that volitional personality change (attempting to alter certain aspects of your personality) is possible by gradually exposing yourself to challenging situations, similar to stress inoculation training used in the military.

Dr Rose Aghdami is a coaching psychologist and creator of the ResilientME app. She suggests that increasing our stress threshold is a matter of undoing bad habits. “Many of our responses in life, including the way we handle stress, are learnt, not inherent. Therefore it follows that unhealthy or unhelpful ways people respond to stress can be unlearnt.”